Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Eleanor wondered about Mrs. Churchill, whom she found attractive, remarkably young looking, and full of charm. “One feels that she has had to assume a role because of being in public life and that the role is now part of her, but one wonders what she is like underneath.” The prime minister’s wife worked hard on Russian and Chinese relief, but “is very careful not to voice any opinions publicly or to associate with any political organizations. This I felt was true of the wives of all the public officials whom I met.” How different from herself. Dr. George Gallup was in the midst of taking a poll which showed that Eleanor Roosevelt “probably is the target of more adverse criticism and the object of more praise than any other woman in American history.” For every two persons who thought the First Lady talked too much Gallup’s interviewers found three who approved of her courage and ability to speak out. It was a rare respondent who was neutral about her.21

  She attended a luncheon with women members of Parliament arranged by Lady Astor, and her feminist heart noted that “these women seem to suffer from the same difficulties that women suffer from in the U.S.A. when they hold public office.” They invited her to be present in the House when they raised questions about the inequalities which British women endured in such matters as income tax and compensation for war injuries, but Eleanor was staying out of political controversy. She was a guest, and though the cause of women’s equality was one she felt strongly about, it would not have been seemly for her to get involved in British controversies over this principle. She also regretfully declined several invitations she received from the many groups espousing the cause of Indian self-government, including a request for an interview sent by the head of the India League, V. K. Krishna Menon.

  One ardent feminist who wanted to see her but did not quite qualify for Lady Astor’s luncheon was George Bernard Shaw. “Bring the First Lady to tea when you come,” he wrote Lady Astor on one of the postcards that was his epistolary trademark. “When she returns home the first question they will ask her is ‘Have you seen Shaw?’ If she has to say No, it will cost Franklyn [sic] at least half a dozen votes in the next presidential election.” H. G. Wells was more modest: “I don’t think Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s visit to London should include me,” he wrote Winant, “but I think I might have a few words in private with the young man her son.”

  Churchill, despite his political set-to with the First Lady, rejoiced in the good that her visit was doing. He cabled the president:

  I thought you would like to know that Mrs. Roosevelt’s visit here is a great success. She has been very happy about it herself. I hope that the friendly reception by all people here has been reported as enthusiastically at home as it has been in this country. If you have any suggestions I will be glad to follow them—Elliott and Mrs. Roosevelt are well.

  In between inspections and official luncheons and dinners, the procession of royalty had begun. Eleanor had just succeeded in getting her coat and hat off when the king of Norway and Crown Prince Olaf arrived: “We had almost an hour’s talk and I like the King very much.” When they left the young king of Yugoslavia, Peter, appeared with an aide. His visit was heavier sledding. He stayed three quarters of an hour “and somehow or other we managed to converse for that length of time.” Later that day the president of Poland and Prime Minister Sikorski came:

  The conversation centered about getting Polish prisoners out of Russia. They were grateful for what had been done and they felt that Mr. Willkie had put the President’s suggestions before Mr. Stalin and this had been a help, but they still have people like their greatest surgeon and greatest philosopher in prison in Russia and do not know how to get the Russian government to liberate them.

  The Polish delegation was followed by the Greek king, and he was followed by Belgian Premier Pierlot, “who talked primarily about feeding children and young people in Belgium and was very insistent that this should be done.” Another day she had a long talk with President Beneš and Jan Masaryk.

  Her most daunting encounter, except for the night she spent with Queen Mother Mary, was her call on Queen Wilhelmina. “She greeted me warmly and allowed me to kiss her,” Eleanor noted, “which gave me a sense of intimacy I had never expected to have but have never since lost.” She spent an hour with the queen, and they talked about the postwar world.

  Her night at Badminton with Queen Mary came after a full day with American troops, attending religious services, visiting a hospital, inspecting camp arrangements, chatting with men and officers everywhere, and ending with a visit to the American Red Cross Club run by Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., where she beat time with her foot as the men sang “Home on the Range,” which she told them was her husband’s favorite song. It was just before the mid-term congressional elections, and the reporters tried to stir up a little political controversy between the First Lady and the Oyster Bay Eleanor, whose husband, when asked in 1933 his relationship to the incoming president, had quipped, “Fifth cousin—about to be removed.” But both Eleanors were on their guard.

  At precisely 6:30 P.M. General John Lee delivered Eleanor and Tommy to Beaufort Castle. The queen mother met her at the door and took her to her sitting room. After an exchange of pleasantries, Queen Mary showed her her room, which was vast as a barn and cold but “very grand with Chinese Chippendale furniture. She showed where the bathroom and the w.c. were & they were cold as well.”

  Dinner was not “a hilarious meal,” but she made “valiant efforts” at conversation. Afterward they went into the drawing room and stood for fifteen minutes. Then the queen asked her and the princess royal to her sitting room. Tommy was left behind, “and soon escaped and went to bed” in order to keep warm. The queen mother and Eleanor talked for an hour, “but I found it hard to forget enough and yet remember enough! Conversation must flow but you must not sit down or leave until you are given the high sign!” The president had particularly wanted her to call on the queen mother because she had been so nice to his mother, and when Eleanor left Queen Mary gave her a photograph to give to the president as a fellow-conservationist. It showed the queen mother, fully dressed in hat, gloves, and veil, sawing a dead limb off a tree with one of her aides at the other end of the saw. The president loved it.22

  Eleanor’s visits to American troops continued. She inspected a parachute battalion which was about to fly to North Africa. As she watched the battalion parade, inspected the men’s kits, and saw a few men jump, she sensed “a tension but nothing was said.” She dropped in on a bomber squadron and persuaded two husky pilots to haul her up into the cockpit of the Flying Fortress “Phyllis.” “I found I’m very fat for a pilot’s seat,” she said afterward; “it wasn’t made to accommodate an old lady well over 50.” She inspected Elliott’s photo reconnaissance unit, her chauffeur getting lost on the way and having to telephone the embassy for additional directions, explaining in code words that “Rover has lost her pup.” She inspected a tank corps which “had to stand in the cold and wet while I was shown everything from a tank to a jeep & I felt sorry for them, but they weren’t any wetter or colder than I was!” She saw her first Negro troops and liked it when their officer, white, insisted that his men were the best in the Army.

  She was in and out of London and toured the provinces, escorted by Lady Reading and accompanied by Dorsey Fisher and Chalmers Roberts and a sizable contingent of correspondents. She visited Bristol, Birmingham, and Liverpool, where she spotted a Liberty ship and asked to be taken aboard so she might look it over. She visited the barracks of the Negro troops in Liverpool. The original group had gone to North Africa, and the newly arrived transport troops were delighted to see the First Lady. She knew how bitterly Negroes resented their assignment to noncombat, menial jobs, but she was in England to improve morale not to reform the Armed Forces.†

  Before she flew to Ulster and the great naval base at Londonderry she made a radio broadcast. The burden of her speech was that there must not be any easy relaxation after the war if a real victory for mankind was to be won
. The British people who had performed so valiantly might well be tired when war came to an end “but we cannot be too tired to win the peace if our civilization is to go on.”

  The speech had a larger listening audience, the head of the BBC informed Winant, “than any previous talk at that time, which is the peak listening period. The estimated figure was 51.4 per cent of the total adult civilian population of Great Britain—a very large number indeed.”24

  In Londonderry at the naval base “we were warm and I secured from the Navy Hospital some kleenex which was a godsend since I had a vile cold in my head.” Captain Davis, in charge of the hospital, asked her to tell Admiral McIntire that all he asked was to be let alone. She thought he was doing a good job, even though he objected strongly to Navy nurses: “He said women had no place in the Services. . . . One gathers from his conversation that he does not like ladies.” After dinner they visited a Red Cross Club which was having a dance. A slightly drunken soldier followed her around asking her to dance until a major, thinking she was annoyed (“though as a matter of fact I was amused”), steered him away.

  The next day in Glasgow began at eight in the morning, and at midnight she still was going strong in the great Rolls plant, where she made a brief speech in the hope that she then could bid her hosts good night. But the gentleman who spoke after her went on and on

  until I thought we were never going home to bed. The newspaper women sat in the front row and looked about to die. (I thought they were exhausted by the full day, but I learned afterwards that they had stayed up practically all night playing poker with officers in Londonderry.)

  The final day of the trip through the provinces was also the most grueling. They journeyed down the Clyde on a steamer. The men in the shipyards gathered along the rails of the ships on which they were working to give her a cheer, and Eleanor stood in the prow for almost two hours, waving continuously. “I was so cold that my hands became congealed and I wish I had remembered to wear my black panties.” Even her fur coat felt like cotton. Then she made a little speech to the men in a yard which had just finished an aircraft carrier, at the end of which Sir Harry Lauder stepped up and led the crowd in singing “To the End of the Road.” And later at the luncheon in her honor, he sang, “Will Ye No Come Back Again?” A drive to Edinburgh during which she argued with the awesome Lord Rosebery about Russia’s future, a reception at the lord provost’s, and at last the night train to London.

  There were a few final engagements in London, including a luncheon with women who had been at Allenswood with her, and a visit with the king to look at an apartment which he thought might be suitable for the president when he visited England.

  There had been much transatlantic discussion about how she should travel home. The southern route by commercial plane was finally ruled out because Churchill and Winant both feared the Germans might force the plane down. “I don’t care how you send her home,” Roosevelt terminated the discussion; “just send her.”

  Mrs. Churchill came to see her on the day of her departure. The prime minister was in Chequers, but he sent her a note in his own hand: “You certainly have left golden footprints behind you.” She should convey to Franklin his gratitude for all he had done “for the common cause and of my joy at the blessings which have crowned our truly united efforts. The British and Americans have worked together like brothers. So must it be to the end.” As Eleanor’s plane departed, Chalmers Roberts reported to his chief: “Mrs. Roosevelt has done more to bring a real understanding of the spirit of the United States to the people of Britain than any other single American who has ever visited these islands.”

  Her flight home was on a plane filled with ferry pilots, whose “short snorter” dollar bills she signed, as they did hers, showing that she had made a transoceanic flight. Much of her time was spent in thinking of ways by which to convey to the American people what she had seen and learned.

  The trip went swiftly, and when the plane taxied to a halt in Washington’s airport, “we looked out,” Eleanor wrote as a final entry in her diary,

  and saw several Secret Service men and several cars and knew that FDR had taken time off to come to meet us. . . . I really think Franklin was glad to see me back and I gave a detailed account of such things as I could tell quickly and answered his questions. Later I think he even read this diary and to my surprise he had also read my columns.

  * Six months later (June 23, 1942) she wrote Gil Harrison: “Mr. Churchill is with us again, and I have just been reading an article about him by [Harold] Laski, which pretty well agrees with my own feeling. Intellectually, Mr. Churchill knows that the day of traditional class leadership in England is over, but the old feeling ties him to the old way and down at the bottom he is fighting for that with courage and the best qualities that the old order produced, but still without the vision of the new order.”

  † When she went to see Stimson on her return, the secretary was pleased to find her “very temperate” on the Negro question. She felt the Negro troops were doing well and praised the general in command.23

  53.A CONSCIOUSNESS OF COLOR

  A FEW DAYS AFTER PEARL HARBOR, ELEANOR RECEIVED A FOREBODING letter from Pearl S. Buck, whom she had known since the twenties and with whom she had recently been working on Negro problems. The novelist, on the basis of her long experience in the Orient, wished to alert Eleanor and, through her, the president that more basic than the Chinese antagonism to Japan was the colored races’ antagonism toward the white. A “deep secret colored solidarity is growing in the world,” Miss Buck advised her friend. The five-page letter echoed Eleanor’s own views. She, too, realized that white supremacy had become an international issue, after Pearl Harbor perhaps the fundamental one in the war. “Unless we make the country worth fighting for by Negroes,” she replied to a critic of her racial views, “we would have nothing to offer the world at the end of the war.”1

  Although in the weeks after Pearl Harbor Roosevelt was a frantically beset man, Eleanor passed on Pearl Buck’s letter with a plea that he read it. His sympathetic appreciation of the problem surprised her. He told her he would have to compel the British to give dominion status to India, and that it was essential to enlarge Negro rights in the United States.2

  His reaction was the more pleasing to her because of the presence in the White House of Churchill. With great intellectual force that eloquent statesman was pressing the case for a postwar world order based on Anglo-American ascendancy. He had closed his first speech in Washington with an expression of resolve that stirred the English-speaking world but disquieted the Asian: “The British and American people will for their own safety and the good of all walk together side by side in majesty, justice, and peace.”

  “The Prime Minister is a thoroughly delightful person,” Eleanor wrote an old Hudson River friend. “My only difference of opinion with him is that I do not believe we should stress the control of the English-speaking people when peace comes. It seems to me that we should include all people who believe in democracy.” At times the president seemed to share Churchill’s view. During Mackenzie King’s visit to Hyde Park just before Pearl Harbor there had been discussion at the dinner table of postwar organization and the president had spoken of keeping a monopoly of military power in the hands of England and the United States after the war. “What about Russia?” Eleanor had asked, but he had simply shrugged off the question.3

  Two days after Churchill left Washington, Pearl Buck was after the president again, this time by means of a telegram from herself, Walter White of the NAACP, Edwin R. Embree of the Rosenwald Fund, and others, pleading that the conferences with Churchill be followed by a meeting or some dramatic joint action with Chiang Kai-shek, as “already enemies are using Churchill visit as evidence of Anglo-Saxon will to world dominance. The battles in the Pacific are already being made to appear a war between white and yellow races.”4

  Although the telegram was sent directly to the president, to insure that it received his attention a copy went to E
leanor. And she did jog him on it with the observation, “Not such a bad idea, only Chiang Kai-shek can’t leave.” In the next few weeks Miss Buck wrote frequently to Roosevelt, either through his wife or directly to him with copies to Eleanor. The gist of what she had to say was embodied later in that remarkably farsighted book, American Unity and Asia. “Tell Pearl Buck I read her letter of March 7th with real interest,” the president instructed his wife; “I am keeping it in my files.” In these times, Miss Buck wrote gratefully to Eleanor, the fact that she was in the White House meant all the more to the people “who love our country and humanity, too. It is a great deal to be able to count on someone as millions of us count on you.” Eleanor was not simply a “passer-on,” even if that was the way she chose to describe herself. Pearl Buck also served Eleanor’s purposes; arguments that the president shrugged off when they came from his wife he could accept from someone else, especially from a Nobel prize winner whose understanding of Oriental psychology was indisputable.5

  Roosevelt’s ideas about postwar world organization were evolving. When in May, again at dinner, a pert-nosed Vassar undergraduate asked him his ideas on the subject, he replied that he was certain of one thing: the aggressor nations would have to be policed after the war to see that they did not rearm. “Who would do the policing?” the Vassar miss came back at him—and perhaps that is why Eleanor had seated the young lady next to the president. Roosevelt replied, “The United States, the British, the Russians and the Chinese,” adding, “if we hang together.” Eleanor glanced at a friend who had heard his earlier statement about a British-American monopoly and smiled.6