Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  To develop a program involved painstaking negotiations with established government departments which were determined not to allow the upstart defense agencies to usurp responsibilities they felt were theirs. Speaking to a National Nutritional Conference in June, Eleanor had noted that deficiencies in diet were at the root of one third of the rejections from Selective Service on physical grounds. But when, in early November, the head of the Physical Fitness Division of the OCD proposed to print and distribute a nutrition chart, the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Security Agency refused to approve the chart. Her only interest, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote Paul V. McNutt, was to reach “the greatest number of people with information which is simple and fundamental about the things they should eat.” She was quite willing to have Mr. Kelly transferred to Mr. McNutt’s department if that would expedite matters. “I have no feeling whatsoever if you think it would work better to have him actually in your Department.” She saw similar problems arising with other departments and some method of cooperation and coordination had to be reached. Not even the Red Cross “cooperated wholeheartedly,” she confided to Belle (Mrs. Kermit) Roosevelt. “The Red Cross was supposed to train 20,000 women in six weeks. They trained—rather inadequately—some 3,000 in seven weeks.”37

  She inherited other organizational problems. The Army and the Navy often were not on speaking terms with each other, and both were impatient and scornful of requests from the OCD for cooperation. Every voluntary organization wanted to get into the civilian-defense setup, “which was fine, but also they wanted to run their own show in the way they thought it should be run.” LaGuardia’s part of the OCD staff in Washington was made up of mayors; James M. Landis, dean of the Harvard Law School, counted fifteen of them. They were talkers, not workers, and Landis “fired them all in one night,” after he succeeded LaGuardia. As his deputy in charge of civilian protection, the mayor brought in General Lorenzo D. Gasser, a retired Army deputy chief-of-staff who was “extremely military-minded. He came into a conference—everybody stood up!”38

  Eleanor realized that the job of the Volunteer Participation Division in Washington was not so much to recruit volunteers as to find significant activities for the volunteers who were locally recruited, and she staffed her office with strong program specialists who shared her vision of a better America. She asked Paul Kellogg, the distinguished editor of the nation’s leading social-work magazine, to spend two days a week in Washington advising her. She persuaded Judge Justine Polier to give up her month’s vacation to work up a family and child-welfare program with the interested government bureaus. As head of operations she appointed Hugh Jackson, who had done a brilliant job reorganizing New York City’s Welfare Department. She made Jonathan Daniels, a gifted writer and recognized authority on regionalism, an executive aide, and brought in Mary Dublin, who as research director of the National Consumer’s League and director of the Tolan Committee’s hearings on migratory labor was familiar with the problems associated with the dislocation and movement of population. Together with Elinor Morgenthau, Betty Lindley, and Molly Flynn (an expert on welfare coordination), these persons constituted a program-planning committee.

  Through her discussions with this group Eleanor began to develop a clear working conception of the scope and focus of her side of the OCD. Instead of civilian participation she now spoke of community mobilization. She wanted to make it, as Kellogg put it, “a yeasty force for interagency action at the federal level, and for effective community organization throughout the country.” A conference in her office to discuss the wartime needs of children produced interagency agreement, no mean achievement, on a program of federal support for day care and additional grants to the States for maternal, child-health, and child-welfare services, which the president subsequently accepted as part of his social-security program. She was, said Kellogg, an “inspiring” force. Leila Pinchot, a volunteer in the Washington office, spoke of the impact of her “passionate integrity” in dealing with community representatives.39

  Her appearance in a community created a sense of excitement and gave it the feeling that it was important in the defense program. If the organization still did not have the sweep and vitality of Lady Reading’s in England, that was to be expected when no bombs were falling, cities were not being gutted, children were not being made homeless, and few took the threat of attack, not to mention invasion, seriously. Then came Pearl Harbor.

  All afternoon on Saturday, December 6, Eleanor worked on OCD business in her sitting room with Judge Polier and Paul Kellogg. As they prepared to leave she took them in to say good night to the president. “Well, Justine,” he greeted them, “this son of man has just sent his final message to the Son of God.” He had played his last card for peace in the Pacific, he went on to explain to the startled trio, in a personal message to the Japanese emperor.40

  The next day, Sunday, December 7, there was a large luncheon at the White House which Eleanor expected Franklin would attend since his cousin Ellen Adams and her children were among the guests. At the last moment, however, he sent word that he had decided to stay in his study and lunch with Harry. The first intimation of the attack on Pearl Harbor reached the president at 1:40 P.M. Eleanor heard the stunning news when she went upstairs after the luncheon “and found everyone telephoning.” The president was busy all afternoon with Hull, the chiefs of staff, with calls to Churchill and others. But before she went over to the radio studio to do her weekly broadcast she went to talk with him. She found him “more serene than he had appeared in a long time,” and sensed that it was “steadying to know finally the die was cast.” This was the note she sounded in her broadcast:

  For months now the knowledge that something of this kind might happen has been hanging over our heads and yet it seemed impossible to believe, impossible to drop the everyday things of life and feel that there was only one thing which was important, and that was preparation to meet an enemy, no matter where he struck.

  That is all over now and there is no more uncertainty. We know what we have to face and we know that we are ready to face it.41

  Fearful that the West Coast might soon be attacked—there were reports of Japanese submarines surfacing off San Francisco—Eleanor and Mayor LaGuardia quickly decided to fly out.† She spent the next morning at the OCD office, dashed back to the White House to accompany the president to the Capitol to hear him ask Congress to declare a state of war in existence between the United States and Japan since December 7, a date that he predicted would “live in infamy.” This was the second time Eleanor had heard a president ask Congress for a declaration of war. She remembered her anxieties in 1917 for her husband and her brother and “now I had four sons of military age.”43

  Overnight, Washington was a changed city. Soldiers with bayonets patrolled bridges, railroad junctions, the White House. Uniforms were everywhere in evidence. James and Elliott were in theirs when Eleanor saw them in the Whit House just before leaving for the West Coast, and her heart ached when James told her he wanted active duty with the Marines, even though his father thought he would be more valuable in the Capitol. He did not want to hold a desk job, he told his mother, and asked her to support him. She was sure the president would let him do his duty as he saw it, and within days she and the president were to say good-by to him.44

  She, too, had her duty to do. At the airport she and LaGuardia said they were going to the coast to strengthen civilian-defense organization and morale. No one really knew what had happened at Pearl Harbor, the president had told her, except that no ships had escaped damage, the fleet was crippled, and the West Coast lay exposed to enemy raids. The trip did not begin auspiciously for the mayor. The plane hit an air pocket as he was being served dinner and a glass of milk spattered him, and he retired to his berth soon afterward. Eleanor was at work in her little compartment when the pilot brought her a flash from the Associated Press asking her to inform the mayor that San Francisco was being bombed. She paled and went to speak to LaGuardia. There was noth
ing to do but go on and fly directly to San Francisco instead of Los Angeles, he said. She liked that response. At Nashville she called Washington to verify the news and learned that the Army had failed to notify the mayor of San Francisco that it was merely holding a practice blackout. Everyone on the plane was relieved, but no one that night believed it impossible or even improbable that San Francisco might be bombed.45

  As they toured up and down the coast, they found that practically nothing had been done about civilian defense in most cities. “They all had beautiful plans on paper,” but San Diego was the only city which had a plan in operation. Eleanor went to one meeting “where the Mayor, the Sheriff & the head of the Fire Dept. sounded off on what a lot they had done & would do when the Federal Government gave them the money. I hope I showed them that getting the money was a remote possibility & doing was different from saying!” The mayor of Los Angeles had “to practically be beaten over the head to make him acknowledge that there is any danger.” But elsewhere she found people in a state of jitters. “One thing among others I’ve learned, if we have trouble anywhere that is where I must go because it does seem to calm people down.”46

  Pearl Harbor brought an immense spurt in civilian-defense activity. Defense councils multiplied, there were demands for plans to meet the remotest eventuality, and volunteers swamped federal and regional OCD offices. The organization was being vitalized, but Eleanor returned from the coast persuaded that LaGuardia had to be supplanted. She spoke immediately with Harold Smith, director of the budget, and Wayne Coy of the Office of Emergency Management, whom the president had asked to keep an eye on OCD, and they had reached the same conclusion. “Your committee on Civilian Defense is despondent and despairing of the activities of the organization,” they had written the president just before Eleanor’s return, and they had to have “a very frank discussion” with him about it. After hearing them, the president asked for a memorandum that he could use as a basis for telling LaGuardia that he wanted to relieve him of all administrative duties, having him continue perhaps as chairman of an OCD board. Eleanor, in the meantime, spoke with Dean Landis about taking over the administrative leadership.

  A few days later Roosevelt saw LaGuardia. Smith told the president before the meeting that LaGuardia could not handle the job on a part-time basis, nor could he get and hold good people because of his “careless habit of firing people without much concern.” LaGuardia sensed what was up as soon as he entered the president’s office, and he did not make Roosevelt’s task any easier. When the president said LaGuardia could not handle both the mayoralty and the directorship of the OCD and should get an assistant to take over the administrative work at the OCD, the mayor replied that he had been “unfairly criticized” in the press. Some people disliked him and the rest disliked Mrs. Roosevelt. Instead of being divested of administrative responsibilities, LaGuardia proposed that civilian protection be separated from civilian participation. The president was “fairly firm,” commented Smith.47

  At dinner on New Year’s Day when Eleanor expressed misgivings about giving too much power to Wendell Willkie, whom the president thought he might put in charge of industrial mobilization, Harry Hopkins suggested that Willkie be placed in charge of civilian defense. Eleanor threw up her hands in mock horror—she preferred the mayor, she insisted, even though she was doing her best to have him promoted up and out of the organization. The day after the White House dinner, the president saw LaGuardia again and told him he wanted Landis appointed as executive officer. The mayor yielded. He would see Landis and if he accepted, the appointment could be announced the following week.48

  It was none too soon. The day before Steve Early announced the Landis appointment, the House of Representatives voted to turn civilian-defense funds over to the War Department, which did not want them, and an amendment to supersede LaGuardia by a newly created assistant secretary of war failed by only one vote. In part these votes reflected a lack of confidence in LaGuardia’s ability to handle both the civilian-defense job and the New York mayoralty, but basically the movement was fired by anti-New Deal feelings and forces. “Many people still feel that advantage is being taken of the emergency to further socialize America,” said Representative Cox. The Democrats who supported the move against LaGuardia, said Republican Representative Creal, were joining hands “with the men who only a few days ago attempted to strangle every defense effort and everything else.”49

  The Landis appointment did not silence the critics. “Dean Landis is very ‘pink,’” said Representative Ford, adding, “you would have a hard time getting somebody ‘pinker,’ but, nevertheless, we might have had Madam Perkins, with whose record you are all familiar.” But interest in Landis suddenly subsided when a group of congressmen, abetted by the Hearst press, scented more exciting game in some of the people who had been appointed by Eleanor. They went after the author of this book whom the Hearst press disclosed to be a member of the Advisory Committee of the Youth Division of the OCD. Then Melvyn Douglas, the distinguished actor who was serving as head of an arts division, was savaged as another radical whom Eleanor had appointed, although she had had nothing to do with his selection. Some members of the advisory group assisting Eleanor in coordinating volunteer services were shown to have been members of organizations on Representative Dies’ blacklist. That kept the story and the speechmaking alive. When it was learned that Mrs. Betty Lindley, Eleanor’s chief of staff at $5,600, was also Eleanor’s friend and had been her radio agent, that, too, stoked congressional indignation—as if every good executive does not staff his or her office with people in whom they have confidence and whose capabilities they have tested. But what had been a field day turned into a saturnalia with the discovery that Mayris Chaney, a dancer and close friend of Eleanor’s, was employed as an assistant in the physical-fitness program at $4,600. “Twice as much as Captain Colin Kelly got,” shouted Representative Faddis, “and he gave his life that this nation might continue.” Congress and the press resounded with denunciations of “fan dancers” in the civilian-defense program. Representative Hoffman launched a “Bundles for Eleanor” campaign to help place “unfortunate idle rich people” in civilian-defense jobs. “It is not hard to get volunteers to take work at these figures,” Representative Ford mocked. In vain did Eleanor insist that the valid criticism was that her division had moved “too slowly in getting able people to develop a necessary war program.” With regard to salaries, they had tried to build “a nation-wide program with a staff that included only seventeen people in the Washington office who received over $2,600 a year; only four received $5,600 or more.” The total paid staff numbered less than seventy-five.50

  Such pallid statistics were overwhelmed by the hue and cry over Mayris Chaney. If she was worth $4,600, asked Representative Bennett, why not employ fan dancer Sally Rand, who should easily be worth $25,000?

  In 1941, despite eight years of the New Deal, society still moved in the afterglow of an ethic of work and individualism which made “do-gooders” and “social workers” objects of derision and ridicule. Eleanor lent herself to caricature. Since the OCD was preaching physical fitness to the country, she felt it should set an example. So, during lunch hours and in the later afternoon there were calisthenics and square dancing on the roof of the OCD headquarters. It was done “with all the good heart in the world,” said Landis, “but people weren’t feeling that way”—and the press was tipped off. The government decreed nylon was not to be used for stockings, and when Eleanor appeared at headquarters the next day in dowdy cotton stockings every woman at OCD felt obliged to follow her example although many of them, having no wish to be classed as a bluestocking, hated it.51

  And finally, to cap the charges of inefficiency, Communism, and do-goodism, there was, underlying the hostility of the southerners, the racial issue. A city like Atlanta did not want to let Negroes into its civilian-defense setup and the South generally resisted civilian-defense integration. “Now, Mrs. Roosevelt tackled that in her usual manner,” La
ndis later recalled, “and naturally there were outcries against that, and a lot of people rallied to that banner.”52

  The Republicans were gleeful. John Callan O’Laughlin, editor of the Army-Navy Journal and one of Herbert Hoover’s regular informants in the Capital, was pleased over Eleanor’s growing difficulties in her OCD activities, partly because of skepticism of those activities and partly because of her sponsorship of “communists.”53

  “They burnt Mayris Chaney at the stake in Congress last week,” wrote liberal columnist Samuel Grafton. “And one metropolitan newspaper ran four signed columns and three editorials attacking her within the space of two days.” While Mrs. Roosevelt had “unwisely” given a job to Miss Chaney in civilian defense, Grafton went on, that was not the reason Congress was hot on her trail. “They’ve needed you, girl. For down below, the thing is still smoldering, the hatred of the last eight years, of the galling march of social change, so intimately connected with the name of Roosevelt.”54

  It was a time of cumulative military setbacks, almost disaster, but it was in vain that House leaders urged a sense of proportion and decency upon their colleagues. “What kind of statesmanship can condone the taking of a large part of two days’ debate ranting about the employment of two individuals—not in the bill—and making no reference at all to vital items in the bill providing for the safety of millions along our eastern and western seaboards and making provision for the money necessary to carry on the war?” asked Representative Cannon, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, but most of his colleagues were not disposed to listen. The OCD had become “a haven for so-called liberals,” replied Representative Shafer, “who have long campaigned for America’s participation in the war but who are now apparently seeking every means of avoiding the front-line trenches and doing any fighting.” Even the level-headed and usually restrained Raymond Clapper joined in the hue and cry, summoning Westbrook Pegler to “come down here and do one of his justly celebrated scalping jobs on the Office of Civilian Defense. I mean on Mrs. Roosevelt, too, because half the trouble could be got rid of if the President would haul her out of the place.” In a final thrust at Eleanor the House voted to ban the use of OCD funds for teaching “physical fitness by dancing” or for “promoting street or theatrical shows.”55