Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  * She and Ludwig had not hit it off too well. “I understand you are the person responsible for your husband’s interest in the underdog” had been Ludwig’s opening remark, and she had quickly replied, “I am not.” He had had a long talk with Mrs. Roosevelt, a skeptical Ludwig later told the Women’s National Press Club, and found her “only too modest . . . she denies having influence.”

  44.A GATHERING STORM

  IN 1932 WHEN THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT of Colored People sent questionnaires to Hoover and Roosevelt asking them to state their positions on various matters of urgent concern to Negroes, neither candidate replied personally, and if either party acknowledged the questionnaire, Walter White, the urbane but tenacious leader of the NAACP, did not consider the reply worthy of record.

  He knew Eleanor Roosevelt only distantly at that time, but not long after the Roosevelts arrived in Washington word went around the Negro community that here was one person who considered them as human beings and whose sense of compassion and fairness embraced them. “I certainly believe that Mrs. Roosevelt likes colored people as her illustrious uncle did,” a Harlem editor told a Negro social worker with Democratic connections, “but I don’t know that her famous husband does. The mere fact that he has not made a single big appointment of any kind among colored people is my reason to believe thus.” Eleanor underscored this part of the letter from Guilford N. Crawford, director of the Harlem Children’s Fresh Air Fund, and sent it over to Franklin with “read” written next to it.1

  Her efforts to bring the Negroes’ plight to the attention of her husband and his cabinet colleagues—even some of the liberals among them—was a lonely enterprise. The Negro in the North, traditionally Republican, had voted for Hoover in 1932. The white South after its 1928 defection from Smith had rallied to the Roosevelt candidacy and was again solidly Democratic. Southern congressmen and senators controlled most of the committees in Congress which held the power of life or death over Roosevelt’s legislative program. Even if Roosevelt were so minded, to support the legislative objectives of the Negro community meant to risk a break with his southern supporters. Nor was Roosevelt, when he first became president, driven by any commands of conscience to give such support. He had easily accommodated himself to the segregationist folkways of the South at Warm Springs, which did not admit Negroes.* Two of his White House aides, Marvin H. McIntyre, his appointments secretary, and Stephen T. Early, his press secretary, were southerners. The president wanted to better the condition of the Negro, as of all disadvantaged groups, but he did not consider himself a second Emancipator. So Eleanor had to move warily if she was to have any influence with her husband or effectiveness in the country.

  The race issue first confronted her in connection with the homesteads—whether Negroes should be admitted to Arthurdale. Negro families were among those she visited when she first went to Scotts Run. “Some of the Negroes think she is God,” a local editor wrote the president afterward. She had consulted Clarence Pickett about the inclusion of Negroes in the project and he applied discreet pressure on the homesteaders to get them to do so, but they had voted it down. At Pickett’s suggestion she invited a group of Negro leaders to the White House to discuss the matter. Walter White came, as did Mordecai Johnson of Howard, Robert Moton of Tuskegee, John Hope of Atlanta, and Charles Johnson of Fisk. It was, said Pickett, a memorable evening. Spurred on by Eleanor’s quick and sympathetic comprehension, the Negro leaders turned the visit into a wide-ranging discussion of the general plight of their race. The talk went on until midnight, when the president was wheeled in and said a few friendly words. The whole occasion was unprecedented in Negro history. There were no decisions, but the consensus was that in the South desegregation, desirable as it was, should have a lower priority than Negro participation in the aid programs of the New Deal. As Dr. Will Alexander, a genial white southerner who was not at that meeting but who later became one of Eleanor’s chief advisers on racial matters, put it:

  We had no racial doctrine, except that we were not to discriminate in the distribution of these benefits—the care of these people. . . . In the South we accepted the fact that Negroes usually lived in their own communities and so we provided projects for them—Negro projects. I frankly admit it. We accepted the pattern.2

  A few months later, when Eleanor addressed the Conference on Negro Education convoked by the Office of Education at the Department of the Interior, she pleaded for equal opportunity, not desegregation. By gently noting the facts, she criticized the states that spent less on the education of their Negro children than on that of their white children. In her view, “the one important thing is to see as far as possible that every child receives at least the best education that that child is able to assimilate.” Illiteracy was the enemy of democracy, she went on, and “wherever the standard of education is low, the standard of living is low.” She sent Harry Hopkins and Aubrey Williams a list of suggestions to insure full Negro participation in the emergency education program of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Williams, who was Harry’s deputy, considered himself “a Southern rebel” and a fierce fighter for racial justice, was slightly piqued that Mrs. Roosevelt should think they needed prodding. He had an assistant send her his letter to state officials which declared that “equity demands that educational relief to Negroes be at least at the level of their percentage of the population in each state.” It had already been signed before her memo was received, the accompanying note said.3

  Eleanor knew that Harry Hopkins and Aubrey Williams were among the more courageous New Deal administrators on the race issue but she also knew the pressure they were under from the South to allocate funds in a way that would reinforce an economic structure based on Negro peonage. When Williams had gone to Mississippi during the Hoover administration to urge the establishment of minimal relief, the planters had opposed even the giving of seeds. “They did not want their ‘niggers’ planting gardens!” Despite Hopkins’ benevolence and Williams’ zeal, Walter White complained that their directives were being nullified at lower levels. Eleanor sent White’s bill of particulars to Hopkins, adding, “I wonder if you will watch the colored situation quite closely and let me know from time to time how things are going for these people.”4

  An awakening Negro press wanted more. “The only way the Negro is going to get fair treatment,” the Negro Press Association wrote Eleanor, “is for you to see to it that a strong, capable Negro woman is appointed to get things moving in the right direction for Negro relief.” Were any important relief jobs being held by Negro women, Eleanor asked Hopkins. Did she have any suggestions, Hopkins responded. In 1927 she had met Mary McLeod Bethune, president of Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona, Florida, and they had worked together. Why not look into her qualifications?5

  Eleanor was less successful with Frances Perkins. When the Negro Press Association urged the appointment of a Negro woman to the Women’s Bureau, Eleanor asked Madam Perkins whether there was anything to the idea and if it would be possible to get one appointed. The secretary replied quite frankly that she was afraid to try it because of the prejudice against colored women. Frances Perkins “dreaded” dealing with the race problem in the South, Will Alexander said. He and Edwin Embree, the president of the Rosenwald Fund, were appalled to find that a Negro from Raleigh, North Carolina, whom Miss Perkins had employed to handle racial problems “was a white man’s nigger if there ever was one.”6

  When the NAACP complained to Eleanor that some of the NRA codes being written for southern industries approved a wage differential for Negro workers, she contacted the head of the NRA, Donald Richberg, who sent her correspondence relating to the dispute. The issues were too complex for her to argue them on their merits; all she could do was submit Richberg’s arguments to Walter White and forward his reply to them to Richberg, hoping that her interest would restrain officials from yielding too easily to southern demands for a wage differential based on race.

  Opening another front, she
inquired of Claude Swanson, secretary of the Navy and a former Virginia senator, whether it was true that Negroes were restricted to messmen jobs in the Navy? Yes, he informed her, but from 1923 to 1931 colored men had not been permitted to enlist at all.

  One of the chief reasons why the present restrictive policy exists is that in the event colored men be enlisted in a branch other than the messman branch, they would after training be subject to advancement to petty officers. In such a position they would be placed in charge of and have under them white men, all of which would result in a lack of team work, would create dissatisfaction, and would seriously handicap ship efficiency.

  Eleanor decided there was nothing more she could do here and wrote the Negro editor who had complained about the policy: “These things come slowly and patience is required in all great changes.”7

  One of the most malign Depression phenomena was a resurgence of lynching; in 1933 there were twenty-eight, and twenty-four of the victims were Negroes. “I wanted to talk with you about what could be done to overcome the awful vogue for lynchings which seems to be spreading over the country,” Jane Hoey, penologist and social worker, wrote Eleanor early in 1934. Had Miss Hoey noticed the meeting in Atlanta, Eleanor replied, “in which the women protested against that form of punishment? I think that the thing to do is to really try to bring to the South the feeling that the country as a whole has on the subject of lynchings.”8 But in addition to moral pressure she supported the NAACP drive for anti-lynching legislation, the NAACP’s major legislative objective in Roosevelt’s first administration. Walter White made few moves without keeping his new-found ally in the White House informed. The draft of the Costigan-Wagner bill and a brief by Charles H. Tuttle upholding its constitutionality awaited Eleanor on her return from Puerto Rico: “Welcome home!” White’s covering letter said. She was his most reliable channel to the president, perhaps the only access he had, since he believed that McIntyre did not pass on his communications to Roosevelt. The Women’s Missionary Council of the Methodist Episcopal Church South had unanimously endorsed the Costigan-Wagner anti-lynching bill, White wrote; would she pass on the news to the president? He also wanted her to know he had asked McIntyre to arrange for “a few minutes with the President.” A week later White saw her at the White House, and she told him she had talked with Franklin and that he would sign the bill if it got to him, but it was his feeling that Congress might adjourn without passing many of the bills that were desirable, and he wanted an early adjournment. White sent her a tally showing 52 votes in favor of the bill and only 30 against it.

  With backing from the president, the bill would pass, he felt. But two weeks after he had asked for an appointment with the president, McIntyre wired him, “Cannot arrange appointment requested at this time. President extremely busy on matters requiring immediate attention.” Without presidential support, the bill stood no chance even of being debated. In desperation, White telephoned Eleanor. She wrote him about the outcome:

  The President talked to me rather at length about the lynching bill. As I do not think you will either like or agree with everything that he thinks, I would like an opportunity of telling you about it, and I would also like you to talk to the President if you feel you want to.9

  An appointment was set up for May 7, 1934, a balmy spring Sunday. Eleanor was sitting with Sara on the south portico when White arrived at the White House, and since the president had not yet returned from an outing on the Potomac, White waited with the two women, and Eleanor used the time to brief him on some of the arguments that were being made against the bill. When the president came in he was full of good spirits and diversionary anecdotes, but finally Eleanor and White were able to get the conversation around to the anti-lynching bill. “But Joe Robinson tells me the bill is unconstitutional,” Roosevelt remarked. White was ready for that one, and when this had happened several times, the president said sharply, “Somebody’s been priming you. Was it my wife?” White smiled ambiguously. Franklin turned to Eleanor with the same query. She patted him affectionately and said she had to go upstairs to work on her mail.

  Roosevelt then explained his difficulties with Congress. “I did not choose the tools with which I must work,” he told White. “Southerners, by reason of seniority rule in Congress, are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take the risk.”10

  “I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it and he was most generous in giving me so much time,” White reported to Eleanor. “He doubtless has told you of his agreeing to a vote on the anti-lynching bill at this session of Congress but he told me frankly that he could not promise to withstand a long filibuster should one be attempted.” High as White’s hopes were as a result of his talk with Roosevelt and despite a favorable report by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the bill did not come up for debate on the floor because of the southern threat of a filibuster. White accompanied Senators Robert F. Wagner and Edward Costigan to the White House, and though he had come at their request, he had to wait outside while the senators conferred with Roosevelt. “Support growing but also threat of a filibuster,” he informed Eleanor afterward. As the session drew to a close he again appealed to her to get some expression from the president that he favored a vote, but the endorsement she wrung from Franklin was circuitous and half-hearted: “If the sponsors of the bill will go at once to Senator Robinson and say that if, in a lull, the anti-lynching bill can be brought up for a vote, the President authorizes the sponsors to say that the President will be glad to see the bill pass and wishes it passed.” When Wagner and Costigan communicated the president’s message to the Senate majority leader, he did not even bother to reply, and the Senate adjourned without considering the bill. It was not on Roosevelt’s “must” list and never would be.11

  With the adjournment of Congress, Roosevelt put the bill out of his mind. Eleanor did not. When White came to visit her at Hyde Park during the summer, she took him in to say hello to the president.

  In October, 1934, a particularly brutal lynching occurred. A Negro named Claude Neal was spirited out of a jail in Alabama, taken across the state line, and lynched in Marianna, Florida. The circumstances of this case were “peculiarly shocking,” the Committee on Interracial Cooperation wired the White House. “Lynching advertised hours in advance, bringing together thousands of men, women and children eager to witness the spectacle. Lynching itself reported marked by unspeakable torture and mutilation. Local officers apparently indifferent throughout.”

  White wanted Eleanor to speak at a protest meeting at Carnegie Hall. “FDR I would like to do it,” she appealed to him, “of course talking over the speech, but will do whatever you say.” The answer came through Missy: “President says this is dynamite.” Regretfully, Eleanor wrote White, “I do not feel it wise to speak on pending legislation but I will talk to the President and see what can be done in some other way on this.” White sent her the NAACP report on its investigation of the Marianna lynching, and also relayed a newspaperman’s report that the president was opposed to the Costigan-Wagner bill. Couldn’t the Department of Justice act under the amended Lindbergh Kidnapping Law since Neal had been transported across the state line? “I talked with the President yesterday about your letter,” Eleanor reported,

  and he said that he hoped very much to get the Costigan-Wagner bill passed in the coming season. The Marianna lynching was a horrible thing. I wish very much that the Department of Justice might come to a different point of view and I think possibly they will.12

  Although White was heartsick over the gruesome details of the lynching at Marianna, Eleanor’s description of the president’s attitude lifted his spirits. But not for long. The president’s State of the Union message to the new Congress, in which the Democratic majority was larger than before, made no reference to the Costigan-Wagner bill. Deeply upset, White hastened to Eleano
r. The president “wants me to say,” she informed White later, “that he has talked to the leaders on the lynching question and that his sentence on crime in his address to Congress touched on that because lynching is a crime.”13

  Sentiment was running strongly against lynching, and to dramatize and deepen public feeling on the issue the NAACP arranged “An Art Commentary on Lynching.” The exhibition included Reginald Marsh’s “This Is Her First Lynching,” a black-and-white drawing which showed a young white girl being held by her mother above the heads of a mob so the child could get a view of the lynching. There was also the famous print by the late George Bellows, “The Law Is Too Slow,” showing a Negro being burned by a mob. A Thomas Benton oil portrayed a Negro being hanged from a telephone pole while lynchers replenished the fire beneath him. A “macabre exhibition,” the Times headline said.

  White wanted Eleanor to come, but the Times account made her uneasy that the publicity attending her visit might endanger the anti-lynching bill:

  The more I think about going to the exhibition, the more troubled I am, so this morning I went in to talk to my husband about it and asked him what they really planned to do about the bill because I was afraid that some bright newspaper reporter might write a story which would offend some of the southern members and thereby make it even more difficult to do anything about the bill.

  My husband said it was quite all right for me to go, but if some reporter took the occasion to describe some horrible picture, it would cause more southern opposition. They plan to bring the bill out quietly as soon as possible although two southern Senators have said they would filibuster for two weeks. He thinks, however, they can get it through.14

  Roosevelt’s hopes that the South would permit the bill to go to a vote after a pro forma filibuster were not realized. This time the president did support a vote making the measure the Senate’s order of business after Costigan and Wagner, who were in charge of the bill, expressed in writing their readiness to have the motion temporarily laid aside for action on his “must” program, but he did not feel he could take action against the ensuing filibuster. White demanded that the president condemn the filibuster and publicly endorse the bill. He sent Eleanor an editorial from the Des Moines Register which savagely assailed the president’s silence. Eleanor passed it on to Franklin with the comment—“Pretty bitter isn’t it? I can’t blame them though, it is human.” On May 6 White, in protest, resigned as a member of the Virgin Islands Advisory Council, a post to which he had been appointed with Eleanor’s backing.