Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Admiral Byrd’s proposal turned up in Eleanor’s mail basket at the same time as an excited letter from Pickett did. He had just heard Sir George Paish, a British economist and foreign-affairs expert, who had “practical suggestions . . . as to what our country can do to turn the world back from chaos” including “a most important role which the President could play by dramatically appealing to all the nations.” Eleanor thought this sufficiently germane to the president’s own line of thinking to instruct Tommy, “Have typed copy of letter & send over by hand to Missy for FDR.” Roosevelt saw Paish immediately, and he also encouraged Byrd, whose proposal for a moratorium on war had been made public in the meantime by Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler. Eleanor wrote to Byrd:

  Franklin says he thinks your plan is perfectly possible and, by the way, Sir George Paish has very much the same idea and was talking to him about it. Franklin says he wishes he could speak with you on April 6, but does not feel he should do it. He thinks it is grand for you to do it and he wishes that you might go abroad and see what influence you can exert in Italy, Germany, and Russia where our real difficulties lie today.

  Of course having your letter published did not upset Frankin at all. He likes to have other people try out ideas. You will have to convince him that there is any use in his calling a conference over the air. He does not think so. He insists that we are the most peace-loving people in the world and other countries are not.30

  In the absence of encouragement from Europe’s leaders, Roosevelt was reluctant to commit himself to a specific conference formula, but he wanted to keep the idea alive, and Admiral Byrd’s speech for the No-Foreign-War Crusade in which he called for the establishment of an “efficient international organization” was broadcast from the White House after he had dined there.31

  In July, Japan invaded North China, and by October Roosevelt’s thoughts had shifted from economic appeasement to “quarantine.” At Hyde Park the day after Roosevelt delivered his quarantine speech Eleanor listened with a curiosity equal to the newspapermen’s as they pressed the president on what he had in mind by a “quarantine” and how such a policy could be reconciled with neutrality. “I can’t tell you what the methods will be,” Roosevelt put them off. “We are looking for some way to peace; and by no means is it necessary that that way be contrary to the exercise of neutrality.” “They want to know so many things that I would like to know also,” Eleanor commented afterward.32

  One of the methods Roosevelt had discussed with Sumner Welles a few months before the quarantine speech was to embargo trade with Japan and to have the embargo enforced by an Anglo-American naval blockade. He abandoned the plan, Welles thought, because he had finally concluded “that public opinion would refuse to support any action that entailed even the remotest possibility of war.”33

  Peace-minded as Eleanor was, she was ready for such possibilities. Her whole thinking about war was being shaken to its foundations. The fascist pattern of military threat and racial incitement, the invasions, and the bombings of open cities and civilian populations in Spain and China altered her views about the use of force. On December 12, 1937, Japanese planes attacked and sank the U.S. gunboat Panay although it was marked with American flags clearly visible to the low-flying Japanese bombers. The United States demanded an apology and compensation. To pacifists who were dismayed by the firmness of the United States’ reaction, Eleanor wrote:

  At the present time Japan is under the domination of a small military group. I do not think we have pushed her into her actions by anything we have done. Even the wife of the Japanese Ambassador nearly weeps whenever she talks about the Panay incident, and if you will go through the events of the past few weeks, you will notice that Japan has tried deliberately to find out how much England, France, and America would stand without going to war. I think her militarists have decided that we would not stand much more so we may be spared further exhibitions.

  Then she added, and it was a measure of how drastically her thinking was changing:

  I have never believed that war settled anything satisfactorily, but I am not entirely sure that some times there are certain situations in the world such as we have in actuality when a country is worse off when it does not go to war for its principles than if it went to war.

  The United States was a peace-loving nation, she replied to another objector, in no danger of becoming an aggressive one, but that did not ensure its safety: “You have but to look at China, the most peace-loving nation in the world, study its history, and you will see that unpreparedness and an unwillingness to fight have not succeeded in keeping people at peace.”34

  The fascist uprising in Spain, even more than the Japanese attack on China, drew Eleanor away from the peace movement into the ranks of the anti-fascists. “It gets clearer and clearer,” Carola wrote her five months after the rebellion in Spain had begun, “that it is not a fight between the nations, but between two different points of view in the world: Bolshevism and Nationalism (in its good meaning)—Christ and anti-Christ.” That was not the way Eleanor saw the struggle in Spain. Her young friend Martha Gellhorn had hastened to Madrid on whose outskirts Franco’s armies had been stopped. Miss Gellhorn was vibrant, enthusiastic, and so beautiful that Ernest Hemingway, in Madrid to report the war, fell in love with her (a romance that Mrs. Roosevelt later was to encourage). After a few months in the beleaguered capital Martha rushed back to the United States to speak and agitate for the Loyalist cause. “We all listened to Martha Gellhorn while she told us of her experiences in Spain,” Eleanor reported of the luncheon at the White House at which Martha spoke. “She seems to have come back with one deep conviction, the Spanish people are a glorious people, something is happening in Spain which may mean much to the rest of the world.”35

  Martha also had returned from Madrid to give what help she could to Joris Ivens, the Dutch film maker and Communist who had collaborated with Hemingway in the production of the film The Spanish Earth. She wanted Eleanor and, if possible, the president to see it, and Eleanor arranged to have it shown: “You are right in trying to make people realize that what is happening in Spain might happen anywhere. . . . The air raid on Valencia is terrible, but it is exactly what war seems to do to people. It makes them senseless and cruel and needlessly destructive.”36

  The film made a strong impression upon Eleanor and the president. Hemingway and Ivens were surprised when both Roosevelts wanted the film to be made stronger, because neither Franklin nor Eleanor had realized the degree to which land ownership was concentrated in the hands of the Church and the nobility and how much the peasants’ hunger for land was at the root of the conflict. That should be brought out more explicitly, Eleanor suggested, for it was an experience so different from the American.37

  Her help was solicited for an impartial Red Cross operation to feed the civilian population on both sides. “I talked to my husband,” Eleanor wrote Anna Louise Strong, who was one of the many foreign Communists who had rushed from Moscow to Madrid:

  He agrees with you that something should be done. However, the difficulty is that Franco will not give any guarantees and, therefore, there is no security that anything will be developed for any one. The other side, of course, will give it. Franco does not need food because he is in the country districts and, therefore, knows that his chances are greater if he keeps food away from the other side.38

  With food ruled out, Miss Strong joined Clarence Pickett to establish a Joint Committee for Spanish Children to help children in fascist as well as Loyalist territory. Franco’s troops were laying siege to the Basque stronghold in northern Spain, which though strongly Catholic was fervently Republican. The State Department, prodded by Eleanor, obtained a promise from Franco that children could be taken through the lines to safety zones.39

  The friends of the Loyalists wanted to bring five hundred of the evacuated children to the United States, partly because it was a safe refuge, but also because of the propaganda value. Eleanor opposed this, feeling that it was fairer to th
e children and their parents to keep them as close to home as possible. When some of her friends began to accuse the State and Labor Departments of creating artificial obstacles, she showed annoyance: “Emotionally it is very easy to say that we should receive the children in this country, but it requires a little more than emotion to do the wise thing.” It was difficult not to react emotionally in the face of Franco’s indiscriminate bombing of Madrid and Bilbao, Martha said in defense of herself and others who supported the evacuation. She did not mean, Eleanor replied,

  that one should not feel emotionally about things that are happening in Spain. I should think, with your friends and your knowledge of what is going on, you would feel emotional. I simply meant that in our feelings towards the children we must not let our judgment be warped by our emotions . . . I think Allen Wardwell will be successful in raising the money and supplies for us to send both to Spain and to the neighboring countries.40

  The money was raised and administered by the American Friends Service Committee

  The Catholics were apprehensive over Eleanor’s increasingly open expressions of sympathy for the Spanish Republic. Patrick Scanlan, managing editor of the diocesan paper the Brooklyn Tablet, noted that she was a sponsor of a fiesta the proceeds of which were to be used to purchase milk for the “distressed children” of Spain. “Might we ask, however, if the proceeds are to be used for needy children in Nationalist as well as Loyalist territory in the war . . . ?” “Dear Sir,” she replied with terse formality. “I make no distinction in children. Any needing help should be helped.”41

  American Catholics sided with General Franco as strongly as New Dealers did with Republican Spain. And guarded though Eleanor was in her expressions of sympathy with the Republican cause, they did not escape the watchful eyes of a Church hierarchy, which was becoming increasingly hostile to her on other scores. The Knights of Columbus criticized her views on divorce; the bishops did not like her patronage of the American Youth Congress; her sponsorship of an educational film Birth of a Baby was denounced by Catholic women’s groups as an “offense” to Catholics; Church officials smarted when she protested Franco’s aerial bombardment of Barcelona and wondered out loud why women everywhere did not rise up and refuse to bring children into this kind of world. He was outraged, wrote Gustave Regler, German novelist, Catholic, and commissar in the International Brigade, that the Catholics should be scandalized by the filming of a healthy baby in the process of birth and at the same time “not have one word for the dead children of Barcelona.”42

  A longhand letter came to Eleanor from Señora de los Rios, the wife of the Spanish ambassador. She spoke of the horrors of the bombardment of Barcelona, the deaths of hundreds of women and children. Could not the United States use its great authority to make an appeal in the name of democracy and humanity putting forward a formula for peace? Eleanor replied that she felt helpless: “I wish that I were not in the White House at the present time and could be free to make some statement.”43

  Catholic opposition to any move that might help the Loyalists immobilized the president. “When the audiences in my meetings started cheering Loyalist Spain,” wrote Regler, “they often called and cheered the name Roosevelt at the same time as a soldier on the battlefield of freedom.” But the president, fearful of isolationist sentiment, even more fearful of the loss of the Catholic vote which had been strongly New Deal, and intent on keeping his position aligned with Britain and France, supported the League’s policy of nonintervention.

  As German and Italian intervention became more blatant and massive, friends of the Spanish Republic in the United States mounted an agitated campaign to lift the embargo on Spain. Within the White House Eleanor was its chief supporter. Journalist Louis Fischer, an authority on Soviet foreign policy, came to see her to argue the case for lifting the embargo. Eleanor wrote Fischer a few days later:

  I talked to the President and told him what you said. He agrees with you, but feels that it would be absolutely impossible to repeal the Neutrality Act, because the people of this country feel that it was designed to keep us out of war, and, on the whole, it is the best instrument to accomplish that end. He feels certain that we could not get the people to change this point of view without a period of education and perhaps from experiences which they have not yet had.44

  Many thought the president had the authority without going to Congress to revoke the embargo on Spain, and the Lawyers Committee on American Relations with Spain prepared a brief to that effect. “FDR material you may like to see,” Eleanor wrote on this. Witter Bynner, author and a Harvard classmate of Roosevelt’s, pleaded the same case in a letter to Eleanor which she also passed on. “The only thing that can be said,” Roosevelt advised her, “is that it seems more than doubtful that any action to lift the embargo can be taken legally.” Bynner thought that “Frank,” as he called him, while “sympathetically inclined towards the Loyalists,” had been badly advised. Eleanor, too, was mistrustful of the State Department. “I rather gathered that the French assistance to the Spanish was not great,” she agreed with Martha Gellhorn. “And I gather that even our own State Department has people who are not very anxious to do much for the Loyalists. Strange how easily our profits affect our feelings for democracy!”45

  Max Lerner, sitting next to Eleanor at a refugee-aid dinner, warned her that he would have to attack the president sharply on the embargo issue. “Say what you think and feel,” she replied unhesitatingly. “My husband would want you to. There are so many from the other side who are pushing him from their direction that we had better build our own fires to counteract their pressures.”46

  By the end of 1938 all of Loyalist Spain except Madrid had fallen. In one of its farewell gestures, the Republican government sent Eleanor a set of Goya etchings taken from the original. “It is a genuine emotion and not a formal state gesure to give these pictures to you,” Martha assured her. The Brooklyn Tablet protested her acceptance of this gift. “In view of Franco’s victory in Spain I think it would be highly improper for you to accept the Goya etchings stolen from the Spanish people,” a Brooklyn reader of the Tablet wrote her. “Any sympathy you showed for the Loyalists in Spain was in very bad taste. As First Lady of the Land you should have assumed a neutral position.”

  “We are still recognizing the Loyalist Government,” she replied defiantly:

  The Goya etchings are not “stolen” but done by a Spanish Loyalist and therefore the property of the Loyalist Government.

  I am not neutral in feeling, as I believe in Democracy and the right of a people to choose their own government without having it imposed on them by Hitler and Mussolini.

  She refused to be intimidated, and sent the four books to the Corcoran Gallery to be placed on exhibition. “It is one of the five impressions done from old prints, and bound especially for me,” her accompanying letter said. “I hope the people will enjoy seeing them.”47

  The war was lost. “At this very sad hour,” Señora de los Rios wrote her from New York City, where her husband had accepted appointment to the Graduate Faculty in Exile, “I can only say that your kindness, courtesy and understanding have made much easier, circumstances which at times seemed beyond endurance.”48

  In Los Angeles a Catholic group threatened to boycott Eleanor’s lecture unless she was introduced by someone other than Senator Robert W. Kenny, who, the Catholics said, was a sponsor of the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, “a group who deliberately left this country to engage in a religious war in Spain.” Eleanor rejected the demand. “As he [Franco] had the full support of the Italian and German fascist governments, it was natural that the democratic Loyalist Government had to turn for what help they could get to the communists. That did not, however, mean that they themselves were a communist government.” As for the young Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, they had felt that democracy was threatened in Spain “and therefore I can not feel that any one supporting them is in any way anti-Catholic or pro-Communist.”49

&n
bsp; In the final days of the war, Leon Henderson, a militant New Dealer and Loyalist supporter, was at the White House when Eleanor brought up the subject of Franco’s victory. “You and I, Mr. Henderson, will some day learn a lesson from this tragic error over Spain. We were morally right, but too weak.” She turned toward the president as if he were not there. “We should have pushed him harder.” The president did not defend his policy.50

  * The weakness of the “merchants of death” thesis has been shown since World War II when governments, including the United States, have become the chief purveyors of surplus arms and munitions.

  † Franklin D. Roosevelt, speech, “I Have Seen War . . . I Hate War,” Aug. 14, 1936, in Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Public Papers and Addresses, ed. S. I. Rosenman, 13 vols. (New York, 1938–50), V, pp. 285–92.

  47.A SPIRITUAL SHOCK

  IT WAS IN SPAIN, WROTE ALBERT CAMUS, THAT MEN OF HIS GENERATION “learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense.” After Spain came Munich to drive home the lesson that the force of dictators had to be met with force. Yet Eleanor Roosevelt was a reluctant convert.

  Since the country had not been prepared to support sanctions, even against Japan, Roosevelt’s follow-through on his quarantine speech was to recommend to Congress a vast rearmament program and to revert to the conference approach. In this he was abetted and advised by his newly named undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles.