Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  “I never do any talking when Father is around, you know that,” she put him off. Then she added, “I hate to bother your father again, but if you think we should, I guess we will.”

  It was not until 2:30 in the morning that the president was satisfied that the results would not be upset. As he prepared to go to bed, he made the startling good-night observation, “We seem to have averted a Putsch, Joe.” When his wife asked what he meant by that, he explained that he had received information that persons purporting to speak for Willkie and the German government had come to an agreement to compel Britain to make peace in return for which the United States would have unchallenged sovereignty in the Western hemisphere. “From all we hear,” Eleanor later wrote Lady Florence Willert,

  we realize now that Mr. Willkie was backed by forces which were a greater menace than many of us were willing to believe. There was a fascist tendency for an appeasement policy toward Germany which terrifies many of us and makes us feel that the decision of the Willkie backers to keep up their organization is none too good for the country.56

  Roosevelt’s and his wife’s feelings toward Willkie would change quickly. A few weeks after the election the president gave his defeated rival a cordial letter of introduction to Churchill, and Eleanor joined him on the dais at an NAACP dinner. But that was not the mood on election night at the Big House.

  Perhaps she had been selfish, Eleanor said that night, and, wanting to get out of the White House, had tended to underestimate the importance of the president’s re-election.

  * A month later, when Eleanor went to Chicago to address the convention, the ever-perceptive Emma Bugbee caught and noted the nuance in Eleanor’s reply to the question whether she had known the president’s decision in advance. She had not, she said, adding, “at least not from him.”

  † A Fortune survey released late in June showed that Roosevelt would be victorious but that there would be a GOP landslide with any other Democratic candidate.

  ‡ Mrs. Longworth denied parentage:

  Never, I never said that. I’m so glad you asked me about it. It wasn’t true. They were both strong in different kinds of things. I think what happened is that I ran into a friend, Bill Hogg, and he said, “Have you heard what Jim Reed said about Franklin and Eleanor?” “Mush” is a bad, a silky word. There’s no ring to “mush.” How nice to have you ask me if I said that.

  It was “maddening,” she said, to have the story ascribed to her. (Author’s interview with Mrs. Longworth.)

  § When in the closing days of the campaign Lewis came out for Willkie, warning that if CIO members did not vote as he urged they would lose him as a leader, Eleanor wrote James Carey, a friend who was head of the United Electrical and Radio Workers Union and at that time close to Lewis: “That is a serious threat and a dangerous way to function in a democracy it seems to me. I cannot help wondering how Mr. Ford, Mr. Weir & Mr. Girdler welcome him as an ally” (Oct. 26, 1940).

  51.A JOB TO DO

  A FEW WEEKS BEFORE THE THIRD-TERM INAUGURATION ELEANOR wrote: “So many people have been in and out of the house the last few days, and so many more will be these next few days that I ache at the thought. I’m always thankful for these hours from 1:00 to 3:00!” She was, of course, referring to the early morning.

  It was a trying time. She was “immersed in lists and long talks with Mrs. Helm,” who met her with a question every time she turned around. She was “so busy that I can only stay calm by being an automaton. At times like these I try to be a machine or I would burst into tears or run away.”1

  Some friends worried that another four years of an endless giving of herself to the thousands who passed through the White House, of an effort to make some affirmative response to every appeal for help must inevitably result in a self-protective numbing of the spirit. But tenderness and sympathy were self-regenerative, Eleanor felt. “I do not think I will ever become deadened,” she replied to one such warning, “because I live in other people’s lives. I must admit there are times when it weighs me down because I can’t do some of the things I want.”2

  “Beware when God lets loose a person of conscience,” Bonaro W. Overstreet would write of Eleanor’s White House years. That conscience was more exigent than ever as she embarked upon her third term as mistress of the White House. “I looked at my children, at the President’s mother, and then at the President himself,” she wrote after the historic inaugural ceremony, “and wondered what each one was feeling down in his heart of hearts.” She herself felt that “any citizen should be willing to give all that he has to give his country in work or sacrifice in times of crisis.” She was writing about the president, but she felt the same way about herself. Although eight years in the White House repeatedly had revealed the pitfalls that lay in wait for a president’s wife who tried to do a job, she longed to be of use.3

  Just as the saints, even as they performed prodigies of resistance to temptation, worried endlessly whether they were pure enough to justify God’s grace, so the question of her moral courage in the face of the pressures to conform was always on Eleanor’s mind. She was deeply stirred by the hero of Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine, a German anti-fascist who leaves family and comfort in the United States to go back to work in the German underground. How did one acquire that kind of courage, she wondered. What did it mean to say, as she did, that “we must do better than in 1918,” if in yielding on such matters as the tax bill, health, housing, and minority rights the old cycle was being renewed? The time for courage was not later but now on issues relating to the way the war was being fought. What was required of her? Did she have a right to bother Franklin, who now carried the burdens not only of a nation but of a world? Yet if not she, who? And didn’t she, too, carry a responsibility? The country had voted for him, but many had been reassured by her presence at his side.4

  Hitherto her life had been disjointed. As First Lady she moved from one cause to another, patroness of all, involved fully in none. Her thoughts were equally fragmented. The war, which seemed to her to represent a mighty challenge to mankind to shape its future more decently, gave point and direction to her ideas and feelings, and since she did not permit herself to hold beliefs without accepting their consequences in action, she longed for a job of her own to do in the defense effort, one related to her basic conviction that the war had to be waged in ways that gave men and women the assurance not only of military victory but of a better world.

  In the first months of the war she had offered to go to Europe for the Red Cross if Franklin thought it would be useful. He had been sympathetic, as he was thinking of a nationally coordinated refugee relief effort with Eleanor and ex-President Hoover at its head. But Hoover, driven by a bitterness against Roosevelt that verged on the neurotic, brushed aside his overtures. “Hoover turned us down,” Eleanor informed Martha Gellhorn. “Said he would probably be busy organizing a political campaign next year and did not feel he could support the setting up of anything else, but that he would be willing to give his help and advice to the Red Cross. He refused to call on the President.” In any event, the blitzkrieg moved faster than Eleanor’s offer to go to Europe, and both Cordell Hull and Norman Davis, head of the American Red Cross, vetoed the journey after the Nazi breakthrough. They declined to take a chance on the president’s wife being taken captive.5

  With the continent occupied and England beset, in June, 1940, Eleanor undertook to act as the president’s agent in establishing the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children, which was to bring English and other European children to the United States for the duration of the war. When the provisional committee met in Eleanor’s Greenwich Village apartment, its members were eager to have banker Winthrop Aldrich head the Finance Committee; but suddenly in his presence he was proposed as over-all chairman. Eleanor went into her bedroom and called the president for advice. He did not want a Republican stalwart in that position, he told her, so Eleanor composed herself, returned to the living room, and said in her most disarm
ing manner: “It is kind of Mr. Aldrich to offer to be chairman, but is it not better from the point of view of geography to have someone from the Middle West?” At that, she turned to Marshall Field; she knew it was a bothersome responsibility, she said, but could he accept the chairmanship? Somewhat startled, the Chicago philanthropist and stalwart New Dealer did. Eleanor agreed to serve as honorary chairwoman.6

  After the fall of France, she had in fact become, as one historian has written, “a kind of mother hen for all rescue agencies.” Thousands of refugees, frantic at the prospect of being caught by Hitler’s armies, were clamoring for visas to the United States. But the State Department, fearful that any liberalization of visa regulations would incur the wrath of Congress and the public, seemed, as Albert Einstein later informed Eleanor, to erect “a wall of bureaucratic measures” between the victims of fascist cruelty in Europe and safety in the United States. The department’s visa operations were headed by Breckinridge Long, a narrow-minded conservative who was determined to hold refugee admissions down to a minimum.7

  There was one sure way to bypass administrative bureaucracy in New Deal Washington—to appeal to the president through his wife. Eleanor was flooded with appeals to help obtain visas, and to each request she gave an affirmative response, often turning to Sumner Welles, who was sympathetic to the refugees. If Welles was unable to help, she went to Franklin, especially in the cases of the hundreds of intellectuals and political and trade-union leaders who were trapped in unoccupied France. Dr. Karl Frank and Joseph Buttinger, valiant leaders of the German underground, came to her apartment in New York with lists of outstanding anti-fascists compiled by the Emergency Rescue Committee whom the committee was desperate to get out of Europe. She immediately called the president, who was a little impatient with her, irritated that it was not taken for granted that he was already doing all that was possible. It was a long call during which he kept bringing up the difficulties, while she pointed out the possibilities. Congress won’t let them in; quotas were filled; we have tried to get Cuba and other Latin American countries to let them in but so far without success; our consuls can’t locate people; Franco Spain won’t admit even American refugees. Nevertheless, she took the lists and said she would see they were sent to U.S. consular offices in Europe.8

  She sent them to the State Department with the plea:

  I hope, if it is safe and possible to do so, it can be put into the hands of our people in Europe with the request that they do everything they can to protect these refugees. I do not know what Congress will be willing to do, but they might be allowed to come here and sent to a camp while we are waiting for legislation.

  Congress was unbudgeable, so the State Department, through administrative order, established an emergency visa procedure that would grant visitors’ visas to the most endangered. How encouraging it was to have friendly support in the State Department, Karl Frank wrote Eleanor. “I know it is due to your interest. You will certainly know that many hundreds of people have been granted visitors visas. . . . The biggest difficulty now, as you might know, is the problem of exit permits from France.” But the joy of the refugee community as reflected in Karl Frank’s letter was premature. “Is there no way of getting our Consul in Marseilles to help in getting a few more of these poor people out?” Eleanor wrote Welles on September 6, 1940, enclosing a letter from Frank. Although the State Department was authorizing visitors’ visas, the local consuls were dilatory in issuing them.9

  “FDR, a good case in point,” Eleanor communicated to her husband in what had become a running argument between them. “They have been able to come for a long time but the consul won’t grant visas.” Clearly annoyed, the president retorted, “I do not think this is a good case in point at all.” He went on to explain that the State Department’s recommendation was on its way and that she should be patient. It took the pouch ten days to reach the consulate in question.10

  Nevertheless, it was a fact that of the 576 names that the president’s Advisory Committee on Refugees had submitted to the State Department in August and early September, only about 40 visas had been issued by late September. At the end of November Eleanor was prodding Franklin again, on the basis of information supplied to her by Joseph Buttinger: “FDR—Can’t something be done? ER” To Welles she was more emphatic: “I have had word from the Emergency Rescue Committee that the State Dept. promises to cable visas to Europe, but delays them. Is there anything that you could do to hasten this process so that the Committee will have assurance that the visas are cabled as soon as possible?” Her next message to Welles suggested that she had talked with the president: “I would like to have a report as to why so many of these people who actually have visas are finding so much difficulty. One fact is that they cannot get visas to go through Spain. Is there any way in which we could expedite them through Mr. Hayes?”11

  Two decades later Mrs. Lion Feuchtwanger, the widow of the novelist, was writing an account of their escape from southern France. The American vice-consul in France had told Feuchtwanger, his wife wrote Eleanor, “that you were instrumental in his visa at a moment of ultimate danger.” Was it she or the president who had been their good angel and enabled them to escape over the Pyrenees? “It was really my husband,” Eleanor wrote back. “I could have done nothing except when he asked me to do it and I had his backing.”12

  Helping the rescue agencies was important work, but it still was not a job of her own. Nelson Rockefeller wanted her to go on a good-will mission to Latin America, but she turned him down. “So many things of interest have come up,” she informed her husband; “I feel it quite impossible for me to go to South America.” There is no date on this letter, but on January 9, 1941, she informed Rockefeller, “I have decided it would not be wise for me to go to South America now so I am giving up the idea.”13

  Her hopes of usefulness were pointed in another direction—to use the war emergency to build a unity of spirit, a readiness to share and sacrifice in the interests of a strengthened democracy. She demurred when James W. Gerard congratulated her as the president’s “most effective campaigner.” He gave her credit for something she had not done, she said, but she was willing to accept credit on another score: “I do, of course, believe sincerely that we must continue with the progressive social legislation as part of national defense and if, in supporting that, I have campaigned I am very glad.”14

  Civilian defense seemed to her the instrument for her purposes. Her friend Lady Stella Reading, head of the Women’s Voluntary Services for Civil Defense, was doing a remarkable job in England both in the utilization of women and in the transformation of home defense into a force for social justice. Eleanor followed Lady Reading’s work carefully, and after the election persuaded Franklin to request Mrs. Florence Kerr, who was in charge of WPA Community Service Projects, to prepare plans to make use of volunteer “women power” in America’s defense effort. She became deeply involved in the elaboration of these blueprints, which, when they emerged, were entitled “American Social Defense Organization.”

  Many of the top women in Roosevelt’s administration felt that only Eleanor could supply the leadership for such an organization, and Roosevelt himself evidently agreed for he advised his wife to refuse the chairmanship of a more limited group “because you belong logically with the larger nationwide group that Mrs. Kerr is about to make plans for.”15

  Franklin was aware of his wife’s desire to be helpful in the defense program and even more keenly aware of her growing sense of apprehension that the New Deal was being abandoned. Perhaps in encouraging her to help with civilian defense he was not wholly innocent of the desire to shift her reforming impulses away from himself. At luncheon at Hyde Park just before the inauguration, there had been a tense moment over the issue of housing. The 1940 Lanham Defense Housing Act had specifically forbidden the use of the funds it authorized “to provide subsidized housing for persons of low income.” The provision was aimed at Nathan Straus, a dedicated advocate of public housing, an
d at the United States Housing Agency which he headed. Eleanor wanted the president to see Straus, who feared that unless he or someone sympathetic to public housing administered the defense housing program it would be used to undermine the USHA. But Roosevelt, aware of Straus’s unpopularity with Congress, refused to see him, and at the Hyde Park luncheon informed his wife that he was appointing Charles F. Palmer to the defense housing post. Would Palmer be sensitive to the need for low-cost housing, for schools, and other social services in defense areas, Eleanor wanted to know. Somewhat impatiently the president said he would, but Eleanor persisted. She had been told that he was partial to the real-estate people. Clearly annoyed, the president said, all right, he would appoint someone to watch for those things. Eleanor stuck to her guns: “Would he have any authority?” The president’s mother, sensing her son’s growing irritation, had signaled to the butler to wheel the president’s chair to the table. Now she got behind his chair and helped wheel him away from a discussion which she saw did not please him.*16

  Eleanor usually deferred to the president in matters of political strategy, yet these days she was haunted by the fear that the system of privilege and inequality within and among nations that had led to two world wars would inevitably breed more wars, despite a military victory, if the old division between haves and have-nots survived. When Harry Hopkins came back from the exploratory mission to England on which the president sent him early in January, 1941, she plied him with questions about how Lady Reading’s organization was breaking down class distinctions and about Winston Churchill’s war aims. Everyone was convinced there was no turning back, Harry assured her; they felt that Hitler must be defeated whatever the cost in privileges. Dozing on the couch of the president’s oval study, Harry suddenly opened one eye and said to the president, “You know, Winston is much more left than you.”17