Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  It was a great satisfaction to her that the young people in the Youth Congress thought along lines so similar to her own. In July, 1939, the annual meeting of the congress, billed as a “Model Congress of Youth,” seemed completely to vindicate her faith in the leadership of the group. The three thousand young people who attended the sessions were enthusiastic, informed, and united, it seemed, by a sense of shared goals and the feeling that everything was possible. They hit hard at the United States Congress, but Eleanor did not mind that, for this was the Congress that had killed the Federal Theatre Project and ruthlessly slashed the WPA and PWA appropriations. The demands of the young people were reasonable and concrete—a nationwide program of apprenticeship training, the extension to young workers of the provisions of the Wages and Hours Act, federal aid to education—and, in addition, to support an expanded NYA (the American Youth Act had been quietly shelved), the Youth Congress called for the establishment of a $500 million loan fund to help young people finish their schooling, establish homes, and get started in the world.

  The high point of the pronouncements of the Youth Congress were the adoption of a creed and a resolution condemning all dictatorships, and Eleanor called the creed the finest thing she had seen come out of any organization. In affirmative terms it dedicated the congress to the service of the country and mankind, pledged itself to progress and social pioneering but only within the framework of the American system, vowed to keep America a nation where men and women could worship God in their own way, and ended with the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. And since this did not satisfy a disruptive group of delegates who were demanding that the congress exclude Communists, fascists, and Nazis, it went on record in opposition to “all forms of dictatorship, regardless of whether they be communist, fascists, nazi.” The sessions in the burgundy-gilt decorated Manhattan Center ballroom, wrote Time, represented the “closest approach to a U.S. youth movement.”53

  “There are perfectly practical things that I want to say to you young people,” Eleanor said in her remarks to the Youth Congress. “You will want to learn a little more parliamentary law. . . . It is all very well to have a great many very nice ideas but if you can’t say them so that any child of five can understand them, you might just as well not have them. . . . The best English is always the simplest.” She went on to urge them to get to know their own communities and to take on work that might not be as glamorous as marching in parades:

  Organize first for knowledge, first with the object of making us know ourselves as a nation, for we have to do that before we can be of value to other nations of the world and then organize to accomplish the things that you decide to want. And remember, don’t make decisions with the interest of youth alone before you. Make your decisions because they are good for the nation as a whole.

  One of those present in the press box was H. L. Mencken. “I always like to listen to people who really believe in things,” he commented.54

  Eleanor took the creed and the resolution on dictatorship and sent them to the many people who were critical of the congress, including such good friends as Elinor Morgenthau, who had confessed that much as she wanted to help out anything Eleanor was interested in, “I myself have never been completely sold on the American Youth Congress.”

  “I for one am grateful for the courage of youth,” Eleanor’s covering letter read, and to the Catholic leaders who were outspokenly hostile to the congress, she wrote, “I do not see how anyone can say it is Godless.”

  * Although this recommendation was not adopted, the CCC was a highly popular activity and Congress did approve a three-year extension of the agency on June 24, 1937.

  † See Chapter 49.

  ‡ In July, 1939, Eleanor discussed with Aubrey Williams how to persuade the Carnegie Foundation, whose head admired Dr. John W. Studebaker, the commissioner of education, to finance an assignment for him outside of the government.51

  46.FROM PACIFIST TO ANTI-FASCIST

  IN 1936, IRWIN SHAW, A YOUNG MAN JUST OUT OF BROOKLYN College, penned Bury the Dead, a dramatic broadside against war that was morally so shattering and sure in its sense of theater that it quickly moved from amateur performance to Broadway production. “What is there so dear that it is worth dying for?” Shaw argued. “Very few things . . . and never the things for which one nation fights another.” The play’s lines, as earlier noted, hit Eleanor like “hammer blows.”1

  Her own conviction about war’s folly took shape in World War I, and was strengthened by her tour of Europe’s battlefields and hospitals. She had returned a dedicated Wilsonian, resolved never again to sell a war bond, and when Carrie Chapman Catt, the suffrage battle won, summoned women to the struggle to prevent another war, she found an ardent recruit in Eleanor.

  “How can we study history?” Eleanor cried out at the 1934 meeting of Mrs. Catt’s organization, the National Conference on the Cause and Cure of War. “How can we live through the things that we have lived through and complacently go on allowing the same causes over and over again to put us through these same horrible experiences? . . . Anyone who thinks,” she continued, “must think of the next war as they would of suicide.” In New York a peace march going down Fifth Avenue carried placards proclaiming:

  MRS. F.D.R. SAYS: “WAR IS SUICIDE!”

  Out in Indianapolis, the headquarters of the American Legion, the women’s auxiliary solemnly pronounced that “she is the number one pacifist in the country today.”2

  But though she preached the futility of war, Eleanor did not subscribe to the belief that it was never right to bear arms or to resist evil with violence. She had had too much experience with the clash of wills and the stubbornness of self-interest in American politics to ignore their reality on the international level. And if in her efforts to introduce some leaven of Christian forbearance and sacrifice into America’s response to the world she leaned too heavily on the hope that trust and love might evoke an answering echo in nations as well as individuals, her husband was always there to remind her of harsher realities. As the aggressive designs of fascism unfolded in the thirties, Franklin Roosevelt went with his wife as far as he could to demonstrate America’s will to peace—in response to his own convictions, it should be said, as well as to her pleas—but he also educated her and, through her, a large section of the peace movement, that in the absence of internationally agreed disarmament, a preparedness program also had a place in a strategy for peace.

  “I am afraid that I am a very realistic pacifist,” Eleanor wrote soon after the Roosevelts had entered the White House and protests came to her about her husband’s proposals to build the Navy up to treaty limits. “We can only disarm with other nations; we cannot disarm alone.” Was she correctly interpreting the president’s policy, she asked Steve Early, sending him a copy of the letter that she was sending out in response to pacifist protests. Early forwarded her letter to the secretary of the Navy. It met his approval. Roosevelt’s determination to build the U.S. Navy up to treaty strength reflected an anxiety about Japan. Germany, too, was arming, and, as Eleanor explained to pacifist leaders who felt the Western democracies were unresponsive to Hitler’s demands for equality, it was “at present . . . very difficult to deal with Germany normally, because while she is demanding that other nations disarm, she herself is arming in every way she can under cover.” But the real impetus for American rearmament, which in the first years of the Roosevelt administration was chiefly naval, came from the Pacific. Franklin, his wife later said, felt Japan had delusions of grandeur. “I remember his concern about Guam and the islands of the Pacific way back when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. I think his suspicions of Japan were based on his own outlook of what he felt made the Pacific safe for us. In all the war games, Japan was always considered the enemy in the Pacific.”3

  When the National Conference on the Cause and Cure of War came to Washington for its 1935 session, Eleanor had the leaders to dinner at the White House, and placed Mrs. Catt next to her husband. He promptly pr
oceeded to explain to her, as he already had to Eleanor, why he felt that if peace was to be preserved America had to build a navy second to none and do it as fast as possible. “The President is a sincere friend of organized world peace,” Mrs. Catt wrote afterward. “He would like to see the country in the League and the World Court, but what he really relied on to preserve peace is our Navy! And if I were in his shoes,” the white-haired, grandmotherly woman declared with a show of spirit, “I would want the biggest navy in the world!”4

  The chief concern of that White House dinner was to canvass the outlook for the World Court resolution which was moving toward a decisive vote in the Senate. In the absence of internationally agreed disarmament, Eleanor accepted her husband’s arguments for a naval-building program, but her hopes for peace rested in international collaboration, and, since the League of Nations was still a taboo issue in American politics, in U.S. adherence to the World Court. At one of her first press conferences she had startled her listeners with the intensity of her plea that the United States had to find a basis on which to cooperate with the rest of the world if civilization was to be preserved, and it was largely the prodding of the women with Eleanor in the lead, that, once the Roosevelts had arrived in Washington, had moved court adherence back into the area of practical politics.5

  Franklin had just about caught his breath after the difficult negotiations with Maxim Litvinov on recognition of the Soviet Union when Esther Lape was in pursuit of him through Eleanor about the World Court. She reminded Eleanor that in the spring of 1933 the president had indicated to the two of them that he intended to seek adherence to the court early in the 1934 session of Congress. “I know how many things seem more urgent in the domestic situation,” Esther argued. “But the Court issue is critical also, and the ratification of the three Court treaties might, in our judgment, have a stabilizing influence on the international atmosphere out of proportion to what may seem to some the intrinsic importance of the issue.” But Franklin, who was the greatest politician of his time, sent back word through Eleanor that “politically speaking and judging by the present time, it would be unwise to do anything about the World Court.” The women were not convinced. They undertook to show the Senate that the court issue was not “cold.”6

  The peace lobby was effective. Even though Roosevelt told his Senate leaders he did not want action on the World Court at that session, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was persuaded to hold a hearing on adherence. Would she attend, Esther asked Eleanor. “After all, the objective is simply a definite plank in 1932 Democratic Platform which we all support 100%.” She was “terribly sorry,” Eleanor replied the next day, “but Franklin thinks I had better not go to any hearings. I never go either to any of the code hearings or to any of the others at the Capitol. I hope to goodness that you have the votes to bring it out and that all will go well.” She invited Esther to stay at the White House during the hearings, but Esther declined; it might be interpreted as committing the president “to a more aggressive line on court action than he wants to show at the moment.” The hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were successful beyond Esther’s hopes. The isolationists who thought they had buried adherence to the court along with the League of Nations were taken by surprise. Senators Hiram Johnson and William E. Borah acknowledged that the court supporters had marshaled enough strength to force a favorable report by the committee at that session of Congress.

  But Franklin’s political antennae still signaled danger. She had heard, Eleanor wrote, “what a very good hearing it was and [I] think it will do great good, but they are all convinced that the World Court shall not come up until after the next election as they feel that it would just give Mr. Hearst another thing to pin his attack on. So I am afraid there is not much chance.” But Esther, remembering Roosevelt’s previous vacillations on the issue, wondered if he would move in 1935. In October she transmitted to Eleanor a report of an evasive reply made by Senator David I. Walsh, the Massachusetts Democrat, when asked his position on the court: “I am a supporter of the President and when he recommends our joining it I shall vote in favor of doing so.” In fact, Franklin’s mind was made up, although he had not yet indicated so publicly. When the State Department had sent emissaries to Hyde Park in September to suggest that an adherence resolution be presented to the next session of Congress, they were pleasantly surprised that “Mr. Roosevelt readily agreed.”7

  The effort to win U.S. adherence came to a head in January, 1935. “We are banking everything on the Court getting through this week,” Esther wired Eleanor on January 15, 1935. “We think only chance is to get it out of the way before legislative program gets complicated.” The Senate Foreign Relations Committee reported the bill out on January 9, but Key Pittman, its chairman, refused to handle it on the floor because he was not in sympathy with the resolution and predicted a bitter fight. The bill was entrusted to Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson, who had polled the Democrats, as Senator Charles McNary had the Republicans, and estimated that the two-thirds majority for the resolution was easily there. The president evidently was dubious about the count for he asked for Esther’s, and when she replied that even if one included the twelve doubtful votes in the opposition, there were not enough votes to defeat the resolution, Eleanor replied, “Please send me the names of any one on the doubtful list immediately.”8

  The Senate debate took place against a somber international background. Germany was rearming in disregard of treaties. Japan was preparing to push on from Manchuria into North China. Italy’s campaign of threat and pressure against Ethiopia had begun. “At this period in international relationships,” Roosevelt’s message to the Senate read, “when every act is of moment to the future of world peace, the United States has an opportunity once more to throw its weight into the scales in favor of peace.” But Senator Hiram Johnson, veteran of the battle against the League of Nations, looked at the same set of events and drew an opposite conclusion for American policy. The staccato sentences poured out: “All Europe sits over a volcano. No one knows when the explosion will come. But when the day comes Europe will drag us into the war as they did in 1917, and will hate us afterwards.”9

  Franklin had begun to work on the list of doubtful senators, Eleanor informed Esther, but the opposition also was mobilized. “Father Coughlin is down here now and I have been told that he got one Senator away from us. The President thinks he has a two-thirds vote but he wants to get his big appropriations bill through first. . . . He agrees with you about the record vote and wants it just as soon as the other bill is out of the way.” As the record vote approached, isolationist pressure mounted. Every day, the Hearst press in front-page editorials called on its readers to write to their senators. The most deadly attack was leveled by Father Coughlin the Sunday before the vote. He denounced the court, which he said was favored by the “international plutocrats” who again would push the United States down the road to war, and entreated his vast listening audience to telegraph, today—“tomorrow may be too late”; a torrent of telegrams descended upon Capitol Hill.10

  Esther and her friends frantically sought someone to go on the radio to try to offset the Hearst-Coughlin onslaught. Eleanor agreed to do so if they couldn’t get someone more effective. “Sporting of you to do it,” Esther wired after the speech, adding, “men are worms.” Esther thought the president was not doing enough and that the Senate pro-court leadership was incompetent. Eleanor appealed to the women of her generation “who remember the World War and who desire to take any action they can to safeguard the youth of the future.” In language simple and moving, she reviewed the arguments on behalf of this effort “to have questions settled by law and not by war. . . . We cannot escape being a part of the world. Therefore, let us make this gesture for peace, and remember there was no World Court in 1914 when the Great War began.”

  The telegrams from the women poured in, but in the Senate the speech boomeranged. It was the “only counterblow” to the Hearst campaign agai
nst the court, Arthur Krock commented in the Times, but it “has not had wholly favorable effect, to judge from the comment in the cloakrooms today.” When the vote came adherence fell seven short of the required two thirds.11

  A heartsick Esther went directly back to Philadelphia instead of going to the White House to say good-by. She hoped the president would resubmit the resolution promptly because “otherwise our whole international policy will be shortstopped.”

  Eleanor understood why, feeling as low as she did, Esther had not wished to spend the night at the White House.

  It is discouraging that Mr. Hearst and Father Coughlin can influence the country in the way that they do but that is that.

  Franklin says that he could not possibly resubmit the resolution. . . . Time may change the point of view of this country and the settling of American debts would make a tremendous difference. That is about all we can hope for.12

  While some of the peace groups thought the president should have been more outspoken, Eleanor demurred.

  In regard to the World Court vote—I doubt if any public word by the President would have helped matters much. He sent for every Democratic and Independent Senator and talked to him personally, besides sending his message. I am afraid that the pressure must come from the people themselves, and, until it does, we will never be become a member of the World Court.13