Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  She was deeply concerned with the issue of full employment after the war. She invited Walter Reuther, whom she described to Baruch as “a rather intelligent young labor leader,” to come to Hyde Park to discuss with her his ideas about industrial reconversion. She passed on Reuther’s suggestions to the president, who advised her that “Jimmy Byrnes should really look this over and have a talk with Reuther.” She also transmitted to Baruch, whose own recommendations on “War and Postwar Adjustment Policies” were then languishing in Congress, Reuther’s point-by-point questions and disagreements with Baruch’s approach. “You will notice that he thinks you will have to be worked on,” her accompanying note said. “I do not think you really need that, but I would love to have a chance to talk over these questions and suggestions with you sometimes.”

  “Perhaps I do need to be worked on,” Baruch replied, “but he needs better to understand the report.” At Eleanor’s instigation a correspondence sprang up between Reuther and Baruch with Eleanor acting as mailman, believing that each could educate the other and, in the process of doing so, educate her and give her some voice in what was shaping up as the key domestic issue. “To speak to Baruch,” a memo that Tommy typed out for her began: “In regard to the sale of war plants is Aluminum Company, for example, going to be allowed to expand its monopoly or is the government going to reconvert the plants so as to break their monopoly?”

  Harry Hopkins, who, because of illness, had been away from Washington since January, shared Reuther’s concern about full employment but did not like Baruch’s recommendations. “After being away for six months and reading and thinking of the kind of world we would like to have,” he wrote Eleanor, who was in Hyde Park, “I am appalled at what must be done in this country if we are to accomplish anything like full employment. I am persuaded that the Baruch Plan will not do as a pattern, largely because it completely ignores all the human aspects for whose benefit our great industrial system should be organized.” Eleanor advised Hopkins to talk with Baruch, adding with some asperity, “He does have more influence at the present time than any of us. We do have to work with Congress, you know, and he has more influence than you or I or the CIO, or most people who feel as we do, that the human things and full employment are the most important thing before us.” She believed that Baruch was ready “to go along on anything that will be helpful, if he is convinced that it is good.”31

  Eleanor also served as mailman between her husband and Earl Browder, the leader of the American Communists.† In this case it was a form of reluctant servitude. “I do not like American Communists,” she wrote Josephine Truslow Adams—painter, descendant of John Adams, and inveterate fellow-traveler—“because they have caused a great deal of trouble here and did all they could to hamper us before Germany went into Russia. Now that it suits their purposes they cooperate.” That was written in November, 1943.

  It was through Miss Adams that Browder’s messages were being sent to the president via Eleanor. Because of her impeccable genealogical credentials, the Communists had given her a stellar role in the campaign to release Browder from the Atlanta penitentiary where he had been serving a four-year sentence for traveling on a false passport. Miss Adams was a middle-aged lady in tennis shoes, a vivid personality with flashes of imaginative brilliance that sometimes shaded into hallucination. She had taught art at Swarthmore College in the thirties, had an encyclopedic knowledge of flowers, and did first-rate flower paintings, one of which Esther Lape, who knew her, had given to Eleanor. On the basis of this frail connection, Miss Adams had written Eleanor after Pearl Harbor pleading for the release of Browder in the interests of national unity. Paul Robeson, one of her letters stated, felt that Browder was the only man who could overcome Negro bitterness because of their exclusion from defense jobs. But Eleanor could not forget Communist behavior during the Nazi-Soviet Pact. “I have your letter,” she replied, “but I do not feel I should ask the President about Mr. Browder.”

  In May, 1942, the president did commute Browder’s prison term on the ground that a four-year sentence was far in excess of what was usual in passport-fraud cases. “I am sure now that the whole left wing is working only for victory,” Miss Adams wrote Eleanor.

  Browder, after his release, wanted a discreet channel of communication with Roosevelt, and Miss Adams, who was known among her friends as something of a fabulist, sold herself to the Communist leader as a person who had access to the president, even though the only time she had entered the White House was in 1939 as a member of a Philadelphia delegation that presented a petition to one of the president’s secretaries. But Eleanor Roosevelt had answered her letters, and out of such flimsy materials Miss Adams managed to weave a persuasive picture of an intimate relationship with the White House.

  By the end of 1943 Miss Adams’s letters increasingly quoted Browder. “Willkie flirts heavily with the left,” Miss Adams reported Browder as saying, “but those I know made up their minds to keep certain promises we made on national unity in case of the ending of the Atlanta situation.” A month later a penciled note from Miss Adams described how “E.B.” had kept James Patton, president of the National Farmers Union, who was leaning toward Willkie, in line for Roosevelt. To be sure, Mrs. Roosevelt understood this was a message intended for the president, Miss Adams ended her letter. “It would be tragic I think if the President did not have this story.” Evidently Eleanor did not grasp who “E.B.” was, or did not wish to, and replied as she did to all communications about a 1944 candidacy: “I am sure the President is only concerned with winning the war and not about who is the candidate.”

  “The man who argued Patton into supporting the President is a prominent left-wing leader,” Miss Adams wrote back, scarcely able to conceal her vexation with the First Lady’s obtuseness. “It would be quite natural perhaps if you did not trust him. . . . The President would I am sure take into consideration at least what he said and what he did from the point of view of realistic and practical politics without the least being sold on him or his ideas.”

  By the beginning of January, 1944, it was clear to Eleanor that Miss Adams’s letters were intended for the president. “Type,” she instructed Tommy, “give FDR & say I know nothing about her reliability.” Evidently Roosevelt was interested, for from that time on all the letters from Miss Adams were sent over to him. There was every reason for the president to be intrigued, since Browder was well informed on what was going on in left and labor circles and the information that he transmitted, along with reports on what the Communists were doing to build national unity behind the war effort, including their moves to cool the ghettos and to keep labor from striking, clearly served the country’s purposes.

  The Communist drive for unity and harmony on the home front stopped short, however, of those whom Browder called “Trotskyites” and who, in fact, included all liberal and labor leaders who were actively anti-Communist. His messages via Miss Adams were filled with warnings—against James Loeb of the Union for Democratic Action, against Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union, against labor leaders like Reuther, Dubinsky, and Alex Rose. There was a long attack on James Carey, secretary of the CIO, who was denounced as “a Catholic ending in the same camp with the Trotskyites out of his bitter natural hate of the Communists.” Eleanor rarely commented on the contents of the Adams letters, but Carey was a personal friend. She had given the letter to the president, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote Miss Adams, “but I know you are wrong about Mr. Carey.”

  “I am glad to be wrong about Mr. Carey,” Miss Adams wrote mollifyingly. “The thing that upset me was the Town Hall debate in which he disputed the section of the President’s message referring to the labor draft.” Eleanor saw no perfidy in Carey’s opposition to a labor draft. “Any official of the C.I.O. must be against a Universal Draft because his constituency is,” she replied, “but that does not mean he is opposed to the President.” When Browder, through Miss Adams, attacked the Nation, the New Republic, the New Leader, and “the special Trotsky
ite section of PM headed by Wechsler” for being unduly critical of the president, Eleanor defended Wechsler and the liberal weeklies. “He has a good mind and is honest,” and the publications that Browder has criticized “make more sense to me than your confusing Trotskyite talk.”

  The president found Browder’s all-out support helpful, but he was content to let the correspondence be handled by his wife. It was Browder’s impression that the president felt more kindly toward him than Mrs. Roosevelt, although it was Mrs. Roosevelt who wrote the attorney general and the commissioner of immigration in 1944 when a deportation order was issued against Browder’s Russian-born wife Irene. “I think she did so because the President asked her to,” said Browder. “She was not sympathetic either to me or to my wife.” The president, as Browder had correctly surmised, was a realistic politician, and whatever served the purposes of his policy he was prepared to use. Mrs. Roosevelt, the moralist, found it more difficult.

  Just as Baruch, Hopkins, and Reuther all felt it was important to have Eleanor on their side in the conflict that was taking shape over reconversion policies, so the more socially minded nuclear scientists were coming to her with their anxieties about the uses of atomic energy. She had first learned about this most closely guarded secret of war in July, 1943, from a young physicist working on the A-bomb project. “He was convincing & rather frightening & we must have peace in the future” was her reaction to her meeting with the young man in a letter that she wrote afterward in which she did not indicate what it was that had frightened her.32

  Scientist Irving S. Lowen was employed at the Metallurgical Laboratory, the Chicago phase of the Manhattan Project, which had among its workers Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner. The last two had persuaded Einstein to send the letter to Roosevelt that led to the launching of the atomic project, and it was under Fermi’s leadership that the first chain reaction had been achieved. The MetLab scientists were among the most creative at work in the Manhattan district and were also the ones most concerned with the political and social implications of this new force that they were freeing for man to use. In 1943 their anxiety centered on the fear that the Nazis might develop the bomb first. A message had reached them from a German scientist named Fritz Houtermans. “Hurry up—we’re on the track” was the substance of his warning to his colleagues. The MetLab scientists felt that the military men in charge of the project thought of it as a weapon for the next war and did not grasp the need for speed. They were equally sure that the Army’s bringing in of the duPont Corporation for the construction of the reactors at Oak Ridge and Hanford meant a nine-month “learning period” delay. The costly preparations that duPont set about making seemed, the scientists felt, to betoken the corporation’s interest in obtaining exclusive postwar control of this new energy source.

  By the summer of 1943 they were sufficiently exercised over these matters (Arthur H. Compton, the director of MetLab, later wrote that he had had a “near rebellion” on his hands) to decide to go out of channels and try to reach the president directly—and Mrs. Roosevelt seemed the best way to do that. Lowen, an associate of Wigner’s, thought he could get an introduction from an NYU colleague, Professor Clyde Eagleton, and volunteered to go to her not as a representative of the worried scientists, but on his own.

  Eleanor saw Lowen at her Washington Square apartment in late July and immediately called the president to urge him to see the scientist. The president proposed that he talk with Dr. Vannevar Bush and Dr. James Conant, director and deputy director, respectively, of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. “Dearest Franklin,” Eleanor wrote afterward, typing out the letter herself:

  Mr. Irving S. Lowen, the man whom I telephoned about will be in Washington tomorrow.

  Mr. Lowen says that Dr. Bush and Dr. Conant would be of absolutely no use because they have been so close to the project that they have perhaps lost the sense of urgency which these younger men have.

  There is they believe, a chance that a very brilliant man who is working on this in Germany may have been able to develop it to the point of usefulness. The Germans are desperate and would use this if they have it ready. It is imperative they feel that we proceed quickly to perfecting it and these young scientists believe that they are already two years behind all that they might have accomplished if they had been allowed to progress.

  They want an investigation by an impartial outsider who can see the possibilities of what might happen, but who is not a scientist, a man of judicial temperament who will weigh the possibilities.

  Mr. Lowen thinks you might want to speak to some of the other men

  Professor H. C. Urey, Columbia

  Professor Wigner

  Professor Szilard

  Professor Fermi

  Professor Oppenheimer

  Dr. Gale Young

  Professor A. H. Compton . . . 33

  “I hope you see Lowen. He impresses me with his own anxiety,” she added in longhand.

  Roosevelt did see Lowen the next day and evidently the young man made an impression, for when the president talked about the bomb to James Byrnes that summer, he told Byrnes that he thought the Germans were ahead in the race to develop it. Roosevelt also instructed Lowen that if he wished to send him a personal message again, he should place it in a sealed envelope for the president’s eyes only and send it to him via Grace Tully.

  If the intention of this directive was to cut his wife out of the chain of communication (the president must have been annoyed at the breach in the project’s secrecy that the scientists’ going to Eleanor represented), it was ineffective. A few months later when Lowen asked to see the president again because nothing materially had changed and the Germans, in the view of some of the MetLab leading scientists, were “about to use the weapon we all fear,” Roosevelt, about to leave for Casablanca, referred him to Conant. A desperate Lowen again went to Eleanor.

  With the president in Casablanca she did not know to whom to turn. “The announcement from Germany yesterday of a secret force to be used to destroy in great & unprecedented ways,” she wrote her husband, “has made one young scientist jittery again & he is calling me on the phone this morning but what can I do?” She decided she had to do something, and arranged for Lowen to see Early and Rosenman as well as Baruch.‡34

  “This fellow came into Steve’s office, a little wild-eyed,” Judge Rosenman recalled. “Is your room tapped?” was the scientist’s first remark to Early. “If he had not been sent by Mrs. Roosevelt, Steve would have thrown him out then and there,” said Rosenman. Then Lowen darted over to a closed door and threw it open to see if anyone was listening at the keyhole. Reassured that all was secure in the White House, he told them about the A-bomb project and the fears of the scientists that the project was moving slowly because of military red tape and duPont’s interest in a postwar monopoly of atomic energy.

  “Do you know anything about this?” Early asked Rosenman after the man had left.

  “Not a thing.”

  “What should we do?”

  “You and I,” suggested Rosenman, “should get into a car and go to see Bob Patterson.” They did. Judge Patterson, the assistant secretary of war, confirmed that a bomb, thousands of times more powerful than dynamite, was being developed and expressed complete confidence in General Leslie R. Groves, who was in charge of the project. “The first thing to be done is to transfer this fellow,” added Patterson.

  Baruch saw Lowen the next day.

  The young man was in a highly nervous state. All I could get from him was that he was engaged in developing a secret process at the University of Chicago, and that he was convinced that his work was being obstructed. I could learn no more, but I had heard enough to know that the matter was not in my bailiwick. I asked Dr. Conant to see the troubled physicist.

  There was no way around Conant, who, the Chicago group felt, constituted part of the problem. “I should like to take this opportunity to tell you,” Conant reported to the president upon the latter’s
return from Casablanca,

  that in my opinion, based on intimate knowledge of this whole project, everything is going as well as humanly possible. I believe we are very fortunate in having in General Groves, the Director of the enterprise, a man of unusual capability and force. Criticisms like Mr. Lowen’s are based on an incomplete view of the total picture on the one hand and on the other represent the inevitable emotional reactions of human beings involved in an enterprise of this sort.35

  One consequence for Lowen was that he was transferred out of the project. “I seem to be pretty effectively stopped from doing any more fighting,” he reported to Eleanor. If she wanted any more information, Lowen continued, Wigner, Szilard, and Fermi would be happy to come to Washington to supply it.36

  In a memo to the president, Eleanor suggested that he might ask Dr. Conant to see Wigner, Szilard, and Fermi “to tell about their work which has such important implications for the future.”

  Roosevelt was getting a little impatient. “Dear Van,” he wrote Dr. Bush, “This young man has bothered us twice before and I think Jim Conant has seen him twice. I fear, too, that he talks too much. Do you think we should refer the matter to Conant?” Five days later Bush reported back:

  Conant had a long talk in Chicago with Fermi and Wigner, and tells me they are quite satisfied with the arrangements now in effect and do not share Lowen’s views. I spent all day with Szilard yesterday. His criticism boils down to the feeling that his group have not been fully used. There has, of course, been a reluctance to introduce scientists of foreign origin to the full knowledge of a matter of potentially great military importance. There is also a matter of early patent applications which has its difficulties.