Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  *In 1929, as a student in Berlin, Gertrud Wenzel supported herself in part by acting at UFA Studios “as an extra in the films of Marlene Dietrich”—precisely when The Blue Angel was in production. Jerry Tallmer, “At Home with Trude Lash,” New York Post, 26 February 1972.

  *Chaney’s program, in actuality, comprised Tot Lots (vacant lots to be rented and refurbished for playgrounds and after-school programs); nurseries for children of war workers; public facilities like settlement houses, schools, and parent-teacher cooperatives; emergency training programs; physical fitness and hygiene programs; and rehabilitation and juvenile delinquency prevention programs.

  *A nephew of the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb and son of Lord Parmoor, a Labour peer, Cripps in his twenties became “England’s youngest King’s counsel.” Known as the “Red Squire,” and living in a forty-room manor house, he was reportedly “one of the richest men at the bar” but gave most of his money to causes he believed in. Tall, underweight, and ascetic, he subsisted on a diet of raw vegetables. Churchill and others called him “Christ and Carrots Cripps.” Always formal and distant, he had a socialist militancy and religious fervor that induced Churchill to remark, “There but for the grace of God goes God.” Nevertheless, Churchill sent him to Russia as ambassador, then to India—despite his close alliances with Harold Laski and other leaders of the left wing of the Labour Party dedicated to the end of empire.

  *Before Pearl Harbor there were only 97,000 black troops; by December 1942, over 467,000; by 1945, over one million African-Americans were in uniform, almost half overseas, and all engaged in the “Double V” campaign—victory in war, and victory against racial hatred, discrimination, and injustice. Moore, Black Soldiers, pp. 29–30.

  *At this time the Communist and Nationalist troops were supposed to be allied to fight the invading Japanese. The nine thousand-strong Communist force consisted of three thousand political workers and students, four thousand troops, and two thousand medical personnel and their families. On 7 January 1941 at Maolin some fifty thousand Kuomintang troops surrounded and slaughtered them. U.S. and Allied reporters and diplomats protested, and FDR threatened to cut off aid to Chiang. See Suyin, Eldest Son, pp. 174–75; Suyin, Morning Deluge, pp. 371–76; and Smedley, Great Road, pp. 374–80.

  *Gandhi’s time in prison was an unmitigated disaster. In December 1943, his wife of sixty-two years—Kasturbai, called Ba, or Mothe—died in his arms. Also in 1943 a famine in Bengal took the lives of almost two million Indians. Britain did not undertake emergency food measures until Lord Wavell became viceroy in October. Gandhi and his associates were released from prison on 6 May 1944.

  *When Lash received his full file in the 1970s, he learned that military agents not only knew about his time spent with ER and Trude; they actually intended to arrest him for “sexual intercourse” on “morals charges.” He was to be arrested either without publicity or with “sufficient publicity that ER would not care to intervene in the matter.” Theoharis, Secret Files of Hoover, pp. 59–65. Theoharis notes that General Marshall was so “disturbed” by the excesses of the Counter Intelligence Corps, he ordered it disbanded and its domestic files destroyed. Military Intelligence Division officials passed on their reports to FBI director Hoover. See also Wiener, Enemies, pp. 74–108 passim.

  *Also at the ranch was Dorothy Schiff Backer, whose 1938 affair with FDR was well known to all except ER. Trude worried about her presence. While their conversations were pleasant, ER confessed she was puzzled by how Dorothy knew so many details about the family. With gratitude to Julius CC. Edelstein. See also Nissenson, Lady Upstairs.

  *She journeyed to Hawaii, Christmas Island, Penrhyn Island, Bora Bora, Aitutaki, Tutuila, Samoa, the Fiji Islands; New Caledonia, Auckland, Wellington, and Rotorua in New Zealand; Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Rockhampton, Cairns, and Brisbane in Australia; and Efate, Espiritu Santo, Guadalcanal, Wallis, and Canton.

  *Sumner Welles was a family friend, her brother’s Groton schoolmate, and a lifelong ally. His removal was orchestrated in part by his rivals, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and former ambassador William Bullitt. In September 1940, Welles attended the funeral of Senator William Bankhead, and on the return train, just before dawn, the undersecretary of state—evidently inebriated—propositioned a sleeping car porter. The porter reported the incident. The matter was kept quiet for three years. In the summer of 1943 William Bullitt, with Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s connivance, threatened to publicize the story. Welles offered to resign, but FDR not only refused but banished Bullitt. He told his former ambassador that Welles had acknowledged “human error” and would be admitted into heaven, but Saint Peter would condemn Bullitt: “You have betrayed a fellow human being. You can go down there!” In August Welles had a heart attack, and FDR reluctantly accepted his resignation. ER referred to these controversial circumstances nowhere. Welles, Sumner Welles, pp. 343–45; Brands, Traitor, pp. 748–51; Burns, Soldier of Freedom, p. 350. To date, there is no biography of Bullitt to explain his combined attraction and hatred for such sexual outlaws as his former wife Louise Bryant, his former aide Carmel Offie (who was subsequently fired from the CIA for homosexuality), and Welles.

  *Johns Hopkins geographer Owen Lattimore served as an adviser to the M Project. He later told Bowman’s biographer, Neil Smith, that “Bowman was profoundly anti-Semitic.” According to Smith, Bowman’s purpose—like Breckinridge Long’s—was to stall, delay, obfuscate. Smith, American Empire, p. 309.

  *Lowdermilk’s argument, subsequently published as Palestine: Land of Promise (1944), finally persuaded FDR to announce, in October 1944, that he favored a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

  *Even in the twenty-first century, various groups still condemn Hillel Kook, aka Peter Bergson, as a “right-wing Zionist.” Actually, he believed Israel/Palestine would be a multinational democracy, and when Israel refused to consider a constitution and real democracy, he quit the Knesset. Opposed to the creation of “a ghetto with an army,” he remained a maverick dissenter until his death in 2001. Becky Kook to author, with her father’s speeches.

  *The Moscow meeting had been scheduled to discuss not war crimes but strategy, in preparation for FDR’s meeting with Stalin and Churchill to set a specific date for the much-delayed second front. The meeting was tense, since Churchill still favored his “soft underbelly” Mediterranean and Balkan invasions, while FDR’s military chiefs dismissed them as wasteful “pin-pricks.” (Cordell Hull, see Notes.)

  *The horrendous Bengal famine, and the protracted imprisonment of the Congress leaders, from August 1942 to March 1945, ended any vestige of legitimacy for British rule. After the war, an official inquiry blamed Britain’s protracted neglect of India, and Nehru referred to the Bengal famine as “the final judgment on British rule in India,” its legacy of misery, degradation, and “accumulated sorrow.” Nehru quoted Rabindranath Tagore’s observation, “When the stream of their centuries’ administration runs dry at last, what a waste of mud and filth they will leave behind.” Recent research has put the famine death toll at over five million.

  *Long documented their protracted estrangement. He and FDR agreed about negotiations regarding the great Arabian oil deposits and the need to suspend congressional debate about Palestine, but for three years Long was not invited to confer with or even meet with a single head of state. When Long went to the White House as a member of the Dumbarton Oaks team, he saw the writing on the wall: “It was the first time I had seen the President face to face for three and a half years. . . . I was stunned. He must have lost 50 or 60 pounds. . . . I smiled—he smiled—we shook hands—and he said ‘Mr. Long’—nothing else. . . . It is the only time . . . he has called me anything but ‘Breck.’” Within minutes the meeting was over, and Long understood that he would soon resign. Breckinridge Long Diary, pp. 334–38, 365–66, 373–74, 386–91.

  *The first Nazi transports of Jews from Hungary began on 27 April 1
944; by July, Adolf Eichmann had sent 520,000 east. Then Horthy arranged a cessation, which enabled Wallenberg and the WRB to work.

  *Dr. John Nevin Sayre’s postscript was a “call to repentance.” The signatories included Harry Emerson Fosdick of Riverside Church, Paul Scherer of Holy Trinity Church, Georgia Harkness of the Garrett Biblical Institute, and the bishops of Western Massachusetts and Arizona. Clarence Pickett of the AFSC supported Brittain, as did WILPF leader Ruth Gage Colby. Dorothy Thompson, William Shirer, and other journalists condemned the piece as sinister—even, wrote Shirer, “Nazi-inspired.” For the twenty-eight signers, see Grayling, Dead Cities, pp. 332, 334, 341.

  *Though the miseries of the 433,000 Jews locked behind the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto had occasionally been reported in the Anglo-American press, the realities were mostly unknown or denied. On 19 April 1943 the Jews of the ghetto rose up against the Nazis, and in the ensuing battle three hundred Germans were killed and scores of thousands of Jews were slaughtered. The ghetto was burned; 55,000 men, women, and children surrendered. Most were deported to Majdanek or Treblinka. An estimated 10,000 escaped, temporarily. Only after the destruction of the ghetto, on 16 May, did its realities become more widely known. See Gilbert, Auschwitz and Allies, pp. 131–35; Gilbert, Second World War, pp. 421, 428; Kushner, Holocaust, pp. 144, 315; Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, p. 266; Dallek, Robert, FDR and American Foreign Policy 1932–45 (Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 450–57, 463ff, 503.

  *ER’s friend the renowned Jamaican-American singer and activist Harry Belafonte, then a young sailor en route to San Francisco, recalled the “vast explosion.” He noted that this dreadful situation was the outrageous fortune of black sailors deemed “the lowliest and most expendable in the U.S. Navy.” The tragedy would concern ER far into the future. She protested the arrest and court-martial of the strike force and supported their postwar commutations. But the sailors remained dishonorably discharged and were barred from civil service employment. Port Chicago highlighted the profoundly cruel disgrace of military segregation. Belafonte always believed this tragic example of horror moved ER and other liberals to fight ever harder for change. Harry Belafonte to author, Belafonte, My Song, pp. 53–54.

  *The Dumbarton Oaks Conference, from 21 August to 7 October 1944, agreed upon the UN’s basic charter. Ultimately, ER worked vigorously for the Dumbarton Oaks proposals—with Woodrow Wilson’s widow, Edith Wilson, and the Women’s Division of the Democratic Party. Indeed, the creation of the UN became ER’s central focus, and the Women’s Division organized over eleven hundred Dumbarton Oaks meetings in forty-four states to prepare support for the future organization.

  *Warsaw’s agony continued until 2 October 1944. With over 300,000 slaughtered, the Nazis crushed the uprising—and destroyed most of Warsaw. The Soviets did not enter Warsaw until January 1945. See Werth, Russia at War, pp. 869–83; Wallace, Price of Vision, p. 388. Harold Nicolson noted that members of Parliament were “really horrified” at Warsaw’s collapse and believed Russia “behaved abominably.” Nicolson concluded: “distrust of the Russians [was now] universal.” Diaries and Letters, 4 October 1944, p. 2:404.

  *The largest mass trial in navy history, the Port Chicago tragedy symbolized for many the fraud of this war for democracy and allegedly against race hate. President Bill Clinton pardoned the surviving three “mutineers” in December 1999.

  *In August Allied troops destroyed V-1 launching sites in France and Belgium, but on 8 September 1944, the Nazis unleashed even deadlier—and silent—V-2s. They traveled faster than sound, devastated entire neighborhoods, and killed over three thousand people. The attacks lasted until March 1945. Olson, Citizens of London, pp. 323–26.

  *Morgenthau, Wallace, and other liberals shared ER’s worries. Stettinius’s group of six included Joseph Grew, Nelson Rockefeller for Latin America, Archibald MacLeish for public information, and General Julius Holmes—who was identified with Robert Murphy’s Darlan Deal and “expedient collaboration with fascists.” Only MacLeish was liberal. FDR once told Morgenthau that Clayton “was thoroughly reactionary” but subsequently told Wallace that Clayton “is not so bad and his wife is a dear.”

  *FDR’s long speech, the first he gave seated, was filled with personal asides, and details of difficulties still to be addressed. These included ongoing tensions over Greece, Yugoslavia, and Romania, as well as Poland’s government and borders, all of which intensified despite Russia’s agreement to enter the war against Japan, and the Anglo-American agreement to bomb strategic targets “in direct support of Soviet armies, as well as in support of our own in the Western Front.” Most immediately, this referred to the firebombing of Dresden, launched on 13 February. The historic city of Dresden was obliterated. Because over 650,000 incendiaries (subsequently called napalm bombs) were employed, the death toll was incalculable; estimates ranged widely—from 25,000 to over 300,000.

  *I am grateful to my colleague Manu Bhagavan for this correspondence. ER and Madame Pandit remained allies and friends. Their “close friendship” deepened after Madame Pandit became ambassador to the United States (1949–52); in 1952 she arranged and hosted much of ER’s trip to India; and in 1953 Madame Pandit became the first woman elected president of the UN General Assembly. ER considered her one of the world’s “most remarkable” women.

  *The WRB and the State Department wrote memos about Wallenberg’s disappearance between March and November 1945. WRB officer General O’Dwyer and State’s George Warren, Dean Acheson, George F. Kennan, and Albert Szent-Györgyi were central correspondents. On 30 November 1946, Wallenberg’s mother, Maj von Dardel, appealed to ER for help: “Knowing your warmheartedness and kindness to all those who suffer I have gathered courage to write to you.” In response, ER galvanized State Department investigations and public outrage, which continued for decades. In 1948 ER, Albert Einstein, and others nominated Wallenberg for a Nobel Peace Prize, dead or alive. The entire Wallenberg file, classified secret, was finally declassified by the State Department on 17 August 1988. Marton, Wallenberg; Wallenberg, Soderlund, and Anger, Letters and Dispatches; State Department file 1945–47, BWC Collection.

  *There is disagreement about when Polly Delano revealed to ER the truth of FDR’s relationship with Lucy Mercer—not at Warm Springs before the casket was sealed, but on the train ride to the White House. I have concluded that that train ride was the site of their conversation.

  *According to Dan Plesch, director of international studies at SOAS, University of London, “Churchill hankered for the vision of an Anglo-Saxon world Empire,” defined by “an alliance of the English speaking peoples.” Plesch credited ER for splendid lobbying efforts, in alliance with Clark Eichelberger, formerly of the League of Nations Association. Eichelberger had founded the United Nations Association in 1943, and with ER he created UN committees all across the United States. See Plesch, America, Hitler, and the U.N.: How the Allies Won WW II and Forged a Peace (L.B. Tauris, 2011) pp. 165–68.

  *ER had long distrusted James Byrnes and was offended by his bossy and presumptive behavior during FDR’s funeral at Hyde Park. Trude Lash took notes: Byrnes wanted it understood that he was Truman’s trusted intimate and he gave the orders. Subsequently ER told Trude that “Byrnes was extremely difficult about the arrangements. . . . He told her to ride in the same car with the new President which she refused to do. He protested vigorously” and, ER confided to Trude, “proved himself a very small human being, indeed.” Trude Lash notes, 15 April 1945, in Lash, World of Love, pp. 184–85. ER had never understood FDR’s reliance on the former South Carolina senator, whom he named to the Supreme Court (1941–42) and then asked to leave to become his principal aide. During the war, Byrnes was widely acknowledged as FDR’s “assistant president.” He attended important meetings, including Yalta; was put in charge of the Office of War Mobilization, and the home front. Truman appointed him his first secretary of state in 1945, but to ER’s relief, in Janu
ary 1947, the president replaced him with George Marshall. Her feelings about Byrnes were confirmed after 1954, when as governor of South Carolina he vowed to close public schools rather than integrate them.

  *ER’s reluctance to support a separate women’s commission reflected her conviction that women should have equal power in all UN committees. If separated, their interests could be more easily ignored. But she was pleased in June 1946 when the Women’s Commission and the Human Rights Commission were created with equal powers. Ultimately, her work benefited profoundly from the Commission on the Status of Women, whose members were invited to all human rights discussions.