“And still we wait from day to day hoping and praying for peace,” she wrote on August 29. “I feel that every day that bombs do not actually burst and guns go off, we have gained an advantage.” The thought of war desolated her. She looked again at Thomas Mann’s tract on force having to be met with force, but the sentence that seemed most meaningful to her, so much so that she sent it on to Franklin, moved in the opposite direction. “War is nothing but a cowardly escape from the problems of peace,” it read.
Then it came. “At five o’clock this morning our telephone rang,” she reported from Hyde Park, “and it was my husband in Washington to tell me the sad news that Germany had invaded Poland and that her planes were bombing Polish cities. He told me that Hitler was about to address the Reichstag, so we turned on the radio and listened until six o’clock.” She had just received a letter Carola had written August 19 begging Eleanor to try to see Germany’s point of view and not to judge Germany too harshly. It was the same as in 1914, Carola felt, when the whole Western world had been arrayed against Germany, and just as in 1914 it would be said again that “it is only Germany’s fault.” But who could decide, since “meanings have always differed and will always differ about what is an offensive and what is a defensive war. . . . No nation is better than another and none is worse than another.”45
There was no hatred for the German people in the United States, Eleanor replied,
only an inability to understand how people of spirit can be terrified by one man and his storm troops to the point of countenancing the kind of horrors which seem to have come on in Germany not only where the Jews are concerned, but as in the case of the Catholics and some of the liberal German Protestants.
People judged Germany because of what they heard on the radio.
The radio makes a tremendous difference because one can actually hear these leaders make their speeches, and I listened, knowing enough German, to Mr. Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag. He never mentioned that there was a God whom we are supposed to love, nor did he show the slightest sympathy for the people whom he had plunged into the war.
Her concluding paragraph showed that she was resigned at last to the Mann thesis that there could be no compromise with Hitler: “I hope that we are not facing another four years of struggle and I hope that our country will not have to go to war, but no country can exist free and unoppressed while a man like Hitler remains in power.”46
Eleanor’s old friend Harry Hooker saw her just after Britain and France had announced themselves at war with Germany. He reported to Anna Boettiger in Seattle that he felt Eleanor had “received a spiritual shock. . . . She has always worked so hard for peace and has had such faith in humanity.”47
One question immediately met her everywhere: Could the United States keep out? “To that my answer always is the same and the only answer I can make, ‘nobody knows. We hope so with all our hearts.’” But the next day, in a more downcast mood than ever, she wrote Maude Gray, “The attack on Poland by Russia has depressed F.D.R. He feels we are drawing nearer to that old decision ‘Can we afford to let Germany win?’ Stalin and Hitler are much alike, aren’t they?”48
And to a conscientious objector who declared that “the man who goes to war for an ideal sacrifices his ideals in the process,” she sadly replied: “I agree with you in theory but I would rather die than submit to rule by Hitler and Stalin, would not you?”49
48.MRS. ROOSEVELT AND THE COMMUNISTS
A CATHOLIC PRECEPT TEACHES MAN TO HATE THE SIN, NOT THE sinner. It was a rule Eleanor lived by and it is useful in an examination of her involvement with Communism and Communists in the thirties. Her attachment to democracy was too strong, her perception of realities too clear to permit her to be tempted by Soviet Communism; but her understanding of human weakness was so great and her sympathy for human beings in distress so all-encompassing that it was natural that Communists, too, would be embraced in the circle of her compassion.
Her views on Soviet Russia and Communism in the early White House years can be summed up quickly. She was convinced that Communism could gain a hearing in the United States only if this country’s social system failed to provide Americans with jobs, security, and justice, but she also held the equally strong conviction that anti-Communism was exploited cynically by the privileged and powerful to prevent change. She felt a friendliness toward Soviet Russia as a nation and believed that the policy of nonrecognition should be ended in the interests of world peace and American trade. She was also interested in Soviet Communism as a social system based on planning and public ownership, but her interest was mixed with a repugnance for the Soviet regime’s totalitarian aspects. Finally, she was convinced that America had to find its way toward a more just society on the basis of its own experience, tradition, values, and resources.
In 1933 she had seen the conditions that bred revolution when she was taken around the abandoned mines and desolate mining villages in West Virginia by Alice Davis, the county welfare commissioner. A remarkable woman, Miss Davis had worked with Quaker relief in Russia for eight years and had come out of that experience a confirmed anti-Bolshevik. She was grateful to the New Deal, she told Eleanor, because being a revolution itself, it helped to stave off the famine, suffering, and loss of freedom that she had seen after the Russian Revolution. Once when friends whom Eleanor took to Arthurdale extolled the virtues of the Communist system on the basis of a brief visit to Russia, Miss Davis, although she was a Quaker, lost her temper and told them they knew nothing about Communism. “If you and Mr. Roosevelt had not come to lead the people,” she wrote after that exchange, “I think many of us might have been thinking differently. But now it seems to me that every American must put all his strength into changes that will bulwark us against Communism.”
In the spring of 1933 Louis Howe had taken Eleanor to the camp of the bonus veterans. The group that was most discomfited by her appearance there were the Communists, and the veteran who had exclaimed “Hoover sent troops, Roosevelt sent his wife” reflected the chagrin of the Communists who only began to make rapid headway among the bonus marchers after they had been routed from the capital by MacArthur’s troops. The Communist party was minuscule in 1933; its membership was around 10,000, but many were dedicated revolutionaries, and it was a rapidly growing movement with a great attraction for intellectuals because of the contrast between what seemed to be a breakdown of capitalism and the purposefulness and rationality of Soviet Russia’s Five-Year Plan. The Communists might have prospered had the new administration in 1933 taken the road of repression rather than relief and reform.1
That was evident from Lorena Hickok’s letters and reports to Harry Hopkins from all over the nation. In mid-1933 her letters were full of the desperation of the unemployed and the hopes openly expressed by the Communists that the failure of government policies would lead to a general economic collapse. But a few months later, as relief funds began to reach the unemployed and hungry, Hickok was reporting from the Dakotas that the CWA was undermining the efforts of the Communists, who were “going about from farm to farm” trying to stoke the fires of revolt. And one of her final reports in March, 1936, recalled the headway that Communism had been making among middle-class Negroes until WPA and relief money saved many of them.2
Eleanor had a strong aversion to Communism, and an even stronger sense that the way to prevent it was to eliminate the conditions that bred revolutionary discontent. This was an old conviction of hers, first expressed in the 1912 campaign when she had written from the Democratic convention in Baltimore that “if we are not going to find remedies in Progressivism then I feel sure the next step will be socialism.” She was not a Communist, she wrote a Michigan woman, but she had seen conditions “in this country where there were enough people being influenced by the communists, and I am afraid if I had been living under those conditions I might have been more easily influenced.”3
Although the New Deal was clearly a democratic alternative to Communism, and Eleanor saw it as s
uch, conservatives and reactionaries insisted on portraying it either as the forerunner of Communism or as its ally, and sometimes even as Communism itself. Dr. William A. Wirt, the Indiana school superintendent who testified before a congressional committee that Roosevelt was the Brain Trusters’ “Kerensky,” cited the Arthurdale project as one of the proofs of the administration’s Communism. She did not understand how Dr. Wirt could consider it “communistic to give people a chance to earn their own livings and buy their own homes,” Eleanor protested, but protests and explanations did not stop this line of attack. “They are putting on a little under-cover campaign of their own,” reported Lorena Hickok in August, 1934, from the Rocky Mountain area.
The Chamber of Commerce crowd . . . [doesn’t] say much about the President. It’s aimed mostly at Mrs. Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, Rex Tugwell, and what they rather vaguely describe as “the rest of the New Dealers.” Mrs. Roosevelt especially is supposed to have strong Communistic sympathies and a tremendous and very bad influence on the President.
Eleanor’s mail reflected this whispering campaign, and in answering one of these letters she wrote:
I am at a loss to understand your remark “as to how far you and your friends intend to take him on the road to a government, such as they have in Russia, for instance.” You do not seem to realize that it would be difficult for any one to influence the President against his own judgment, and you assume a desire on my part which is far from fact. I know of none of my friends or his friends who have any such idea.4
Some Americans were genuinely frightened. A Dorchester woman entreated Eleanor to have Emma Goldman deported, because, she said, the anarchist leader had instigated the assassination of McKinley and as long as she remained in the country President Roosevelt was in danger. “Emma Goldman is an old woman,” Eleanor replied, “with absolutely no desire in her heart to do any harm to any one, or any opportunity to do so if she would want to.”5
There was genuine fear of radicalism, but there was also the exploitation of such fears to preserve the status quo. Even the Louisville Courier-Journal, a newspaper sympathetic to the administration, editorialized against the Child Labor Amendment on the grounds that many of its sponsors were Communists. Frances Perkins begged Eleanor to write Robert W. Bingham, the publisher of the Courier-Journal, who was also Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Court of St. James, and Eleanor did.
I feel quite sure that you are not in sympathy with this editorial, but all the world has sent it to me and I wonder if you could say something, gently but firmly, to your editor about classing as communists those people who have worked for years for exactly what the administration has now done through its codes. Because of the codes, great numbers of states are rapidly ratifying this amendment, and this would put the administration, and the President himself, in the class of communists.
“Nothing could have been farther from the editor’s mind than to associate the President, or his administration with Communism,” a distressed Bingham replied. “Of course I should not tolerate any such thing for one moment. I am sure no reference has been made to this subject in the Courier-Journal beyond giving the history of some of the affiliations of some of the people who aided in founding the Children’s Bureau.” There was not the slightest objection to his paper stating its viewpoint, she assured him, except
that it is unjust to classify the original supporters of the Child Labor Amendment as communists. Mrs. Kelly was a socialist but she worked all her life for many things which have since been adopted and are not considered socialistic today. Many people who knew her had great admiration for her and an editorial as bitter as was the one which was printed in your paper of course excites her friends.6
Many of the accusations referring to Eleanor’s supposed Communist sympathies originated in The Red Network, compiled by Elizabeth Dilling and described by her as “A Who’s Who and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots.” Just as the imaginative genealogist can find blue blood in anyone’s lineage, so Mrs. Dilling, by diligent use of “guilt by association,” managed to taint with subversion almost every liberal and New Dealer in the country. If one belonged to an organization to which Communists also belonged, or if the organization was praised by the Daily Worker, or if an organization or individual supported a cause which Communists also supported, that made one suspect; the possibilities of linkage were as inexhaustible as Mrs. Dilling’s capacity for research. As Eleanor wrote a woman who inquired about Mrs. Dilling’s charges:
The lady you speak of is probably quoting from a book written by Mrs. Dilling, called “The Red Net Work,” in which I am accused of being a Red, as is everyone in this country who is working for better living conditions. She mentions Lillian Wald, who founded the Henry Street Settlement in New York, and who was a pioneer in establishing the splendid nursing service we have in this country. Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, who has worked to educate people on the causes and cures of war, and most of the men and women who have had any interest in the better treatment of their fellow human beings.
In her analysis of radical political trends, Mrs. Dilling labeled as “red” such figures as Gandhi, Einstein, and Frances Perkins. Of the great scientist she wrote: “Einstein, barred as a Communist from Germany, in January, 1934, was an overnight guest of the President at the White House.” Among the 460 organizations that she described as “Radical-Pacifist controlled or infiltrated” were the Amalgamated Bank, the American Association for Old Age Security, the American Friends Service Committee, the Catholic Association for International Peace, the Federal Council of Churches, the League of Women Voters, the National Consumers League, the NAACP, and Union Theological Seminary. The itemization of suspect associations for Eleanor Roosevelt was substantial:
ROOSEVELT, MRS. FRANKLIN D.: Socialist sympathizer and associate; pacifist; Non-intervention Citz. Com. 1927; Nat. Wom. Tr. Un. Lg.; Nat. Cons. Lg.; co-worker with many radicals, some of whom have been appointed to Government positions by her husband; speaker, Nov. 24–25, 1933, Prog. Edu. Assn. meeting with radicals Norman Thomas, Reinhold Niebuhr, Harry A. Overstreet, etc. sent telegram expressing hope for success of World Peaceways; vice pres. N.Y. Lg. Women Voters; addressed pacifist Conference on Cause and Cure of War, introduced by Carrie Chapman Catt, who exulted that “for the first time in the history of our country we have a woman in the White House who is one of us”; she predicted unless we change our concept of patriotism “we most certainly will commit suicide”; she revealed that her recent declaration against toy soldiers for children had brought a “violent letter” from a man who dubbed her “preaching pacifism” as “inconsistent if your husband has to call the boys to the colors.”7
Rather than intimidating liberals, the indiscriminate, often cynical efforts to brand as “Communist” all welfare legislation and organizations that were manifestly liberal had the opposite effect in the later thirties of causing liberals to shrug off charges of Communist control even when there was merit in the charges.
In the same letter in which she ridiculed Mrs. Dilling’s The Red Network, Eleanor gave her assessment of Soviet Russia: “It happens that we in our country will never be content with the rather limited freedom that has come to the Russians, though to the Russians it may seem a great step in advance of what they have had before.”
Eleanor had approved the president’s decision to recognize the Soviet Union; she had, in fact, encouraged a change in policy. When, at the close of his fourth-term campaign in 1944, Roosevelt defended recognition of Soviet Russia in 1933 as “something that I am proud of,” he added a “personal” note:
In 1933, a certain lady—who sits at this table in front of me—came back from a trip in which she had attended the opening of a schoolhouse. And she had gone to the history class—history and geography—children eight, nine or ten, and she told me that she had seen a map of the world with a great big white space upon it—no name—no information. And the teacher told her it was blank, with no name, because the school board wouldn’t let her say anyth
ing about that big blank space. Oh, there were only a hundred and eighty or two hundred million people in it, which was called Soviet Russia. . . . For sixteen years before then, the American people and the Russian people had no practical means of communicating with each other. We re-established those means.8
Eleanor’s interest in U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union was pragmatic, not ideological. A piquant glimpse of the attitude to the Bolshevik Revolution in the circles in which Eleanor and Franklin moved at the time it took place is afforded by Caroline Phillips’ journals. In early 1918, at a meeting of “the Club” (the name that the Roosevelts and their closest friends in the Wilson administration gave their Sunday gatherings) at the Roosevelts’, Caroline and the Adolph Millers performed a song and dance, and because the three of them had been arguing for a negotiated settlement of the war, Adolph sang extemporaneously, “For we are the gay Bolsheviki.” A few months later, when Woodrow Wilson made the decision to intervene in Russia and to dispatch an expeditionary force, Eleanor’s only comment was to lament that General William S. Graves and not Theodore Roosevelt’s friend General Leonard Wood “goes in command to Siberia.”9
But that was fifteen years earlier. By the time Roosevelt assumed the presidency enlightened U.S. opinion had long accepted the view that nonrecognition served neither the interests of the United States nor that of world peace. A committee that Esther Lape organized in 1932 to study the “Relations of Record” between the United States and the Soviet Union and to press the case for recognition reflected this shift in American opinion. Eleanor was a member of the committee, as were old Russia hands like Colonel Hugh Cooper, who had supervised the building of the Dnieperstroy Dam, and conservative Wall Street figures like Thomas W. Lamont and John W. Davis. “I think this group will be helpful,” Eleanor advised her husband in July, 1933. Evidently he thought so, too, because he kept sending messages to Esther to speed up the report.
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