by Sally Denton
The gesture, begun as an experiment, was enormously popular, second only to the president’s own historic press conferences. As the New Deal got under way the forbidden boundaries of political questions became increasingly blurred, and her commitment to economic and social justice set the tone. Her role as Roosevelt’s eyes and ears—which started after his paralysis in 1921—was widely known, as was the deep influence she exerted with her husband, prompting many to attempt to gain access to him through her. “That I became … a better and better reporter and a better and better observer,” she later wrote, “was largely owing to the fact that Franklin’s questions covered such a wide range. I found myself obliged to notice everything.” It was an immense amount of power she wielded, for Roosevelt had nearly total faith in her perceptions, and it resulted in one of the most extraordinary political partnerships in history.
One of her initial outings as First Lady was in March, when she toured the scandalous slums of Washington where thousands of black people lived in squalor and disease within sight of the gleaming Capitol. She drove through the ghetto in her own roadster, accompanied by an eighty-one-year-old female friend, stopping frequently to enter back alleys and speak with the residents.
In 1933 alone, she traveled more than forty thousand miles, usually in coach class, in airplanes or trains, or by driving herself. Her crusades were focused on women, children, and the nation’s poor, and she reported her results and recommendations not only to Roosevelt but also to his advisers in their relevant capacities. She pressed Harry Hopkins to provide for unemployed women schoolteachers through his Emergency Relief Administration. She pushed Louis Howe, by now her loyal comrade in the White House, to launch a program to help the poverty-stricken families of West Virginia coal miners. In her ceaseless campaign for social justice and to improve the status of women, she took her cause directly to the president, who in turn urged members of Congress and Democratic Party leaders to hire more women in substantive positions. She vociferously fought the Hoover-era policy of firing married women from government jobs and threw her support behind Labor Secretary Perkins, who advocated its reversal. She enthusiastically championed the aviation pursuits of Amelia Earhart, with whom she flew one spring day. By the summer of 1933, Eleanor was already considered the pioneer leader of a women’s movement that had not yet been formally hatched. She was receiving five hundred ebullient letters a day. “For some time I have had a collection of statesmen hanging upon my wall,” one woman wrote to her, “but, under the new administration, I have been obliged to start a new collection and that is one of stateswomen. Now it is ready and you are the very center of it all.” By the time the New Deal legislation was enacted, Eleanor was already seen by Americans to be a potent force in her husband’s administration. She too had come to see the value in her exploits. “The only thing that reconciles me to this job is the fact that I think I can give a great many people pleasure & I begin to think there may be ways in which I can be useful,” she wrote to Lorena Hickok.
Her work on behalf of women’s rights would spark J. Edgar Hoover of the Bureau of Investigation to create a secret intelligence file documenting her activities through the use of confidential sources and covert surveillance. Such action was extraordinary; never before in American history had a First Lady been the subject of a surreptitious government probe. Reactionary forces had labeled her “un-American,” and in keeping with Hoover’s zealous covenant to sniff out the unpatriotic, he eagerly targeted her. Publicly expressing her contention that Fascism was far more threatening to world peace and U.S. domestic stability than Communism, Eleanor incurred further suspicion from the rabidly anti-Communist Hoover, who marked her as a “subversive.”
“Those who attacked the New Deal as a Jewish conspiracy were frequently (and almost automatically) anti-Negro as well,” according to an assessment of the fever-pitch criticism of the Roosevelts. And no one was more publicly associated with the plight of the “Negro” than Eleanor Roosevelt. Racist ditties and doggerels became ubiquitous. Not since Rachel Jackson had a First Lady been so vilified, ridiculed, and slandered.
Caricatures of her were savage, emphasizing her tall ungainliness and protruding teeth, her sensible shoes and shapeless dresses. “Eleanor can bite an apple through a picket fence” was one slur that made the rounds. Columnist Westbrook Pegler, her most avid and sustained critic, dismissed her as a do-gooding busybody. But just as they ignored the scorn heaped on her husband, the majority of Americans dismissed the criticism of Eleanor, and soon she would be known as the most popular First Lady of all time.
“Despite a lithe, graceful figure, she is not beautiful,” Rita S. Halle wrote in a 1933 Good Housekeeping magazine story on one of Eleanor’s public speeches. “She does not charm by her personal appearance. Yet, as she spoke, the wearied audience uncurved its collective spine until, all over the large room, men and women were sitting forward on their chairs in intent response to the magnetism of her simple sincerity.”
Chapter Thirty
The Shifty-Eyed Little Austrian Paperhanger
“During the hundred days, while Congress debated farm subsidies and banking legislation, Jews were being beaten on the streets of Germany,” wrote historian William E. Leuchtenburg. “While Roosevelt’s ‘forest army’ planted trees on western hillsides, Hitler was rebuilding the Reichswehr. All of the New Deal was to be carried on under the shadow of the menace of fascism.”
Indeed, during the spring of 1933, Hitler’s aggression was gathering velocity as he evicted Jews from government and private industry, instituted a boycott of Jewish businesses, and relegated them to ghettos. He had eradicated his opposition, assumed dictatorial powers, amassed the largest army in Europe, and seemed to have his eye set on war. His “Proclamation to the German People” revealed his totalitarian Fascist designs. The ratification of Hitler’s chancellorship occurred the day after Roosevelt’s inauguration. Reports of Hitler’s persecution of Jews and the infamous book burnings in massive public bonfires slowly made their way to the United States, though most Americans had little interest. Most of Washington considered Hitler more of an oddity than a threat, and the American people were far too entangled in their own problems to turn their attention to Europe.
During the campaign Roosevelt had backpedaled from his Wilsonian internationalist stance, but he was now wary of Germany’s escalating armament. In May he hosted the bizarrely named Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht—German president of the Reichsbank and Hitler’s Washington envoy—to discuss preparations for the upcoming World Monetary and Economic Conference in London. At a congenial luncheon in the Blue Room, complete with a Marine Band adaptation of the German national anthem, Roosevelt masked his disgust for Schacht, Hitler, and their ilk, whom he later described as warmongering “bastards.” After lunch, Roosevelt and Schacht retreated to a private conversation in which Roosevelt, as he reported it, insisted that Germany stop its rearming. “I intimated as strongly as possible that we regard Germany as the only possible obstacle to a Disarmament Treaty,” Roosevelt wrote in a memorandum to the secretary of state, referring to disarmament negotiations going on in Geneva, Switzerland.
Schacht apparently received a quite different “intimation.” “After dinner, exactly half an hour remained for a private conversation between the President and me,” he reported to the German Foreign Ministry. “He began with the Jewish question … not out of particular sympathy for the Jews, but from an old Anglo-Saxon sense of chivalry toward the weak.” Schacht wrote that Roosevelt had expressed the fact that the American people were put off by newsreel depictions of “marching, uniformed columns of Nazis.” In his memorandum Schacht made no reference to Roosevelt’s discussion of armaments and concluded his report with what he claimed was Roosevelt’s endorsement of Hitler’s actions. “He once made use in his conversation of the expression that when it came to the speedy execution of governmental measures, there were not everywhere such efficient managers as (literally) Mussolini, Hitler, and Roosevelt.”
Given Roosevelt’s concern over Germany’s rearmament and his commitment to an international treaty, Schacht’s interpretation of their meeting seems intentionally ambiguous at the least, if not outright mendacious. By this time Roosevelt despised Hitler and was overtly apprehensive about Germany’s saber rattling, and it would have been highly uncharacteristic for him to compare himself favorably to Hitler. The relationship between Roosevelt and Hitler, who came to power a day apart, was “openly hostile from the first,” according to Roosevelt biographer Conrad Black. “They represented two diametrically different views of how to govern and of what human society and international relations should be … Apart from policy matters, Roosevelt detested Hitler’s racism, militarism, [and] totalitarianism.”
As it turned out, the London conference—“a much-ballyhooed event that was expected to cure the global Depression and bring peace on earth in one sweet package,” as Jonathan Alter put it—was a bust for Roosevelt. In what would be called the “bombshell message,” Roosevelt sent an undiplomatic and aberrantly arrogant cable to the conference. He scorned the leaders’ emphasis on international monetary stabilization, calling it “old fetishes of so-called international bankers”—a euphemism for the cabal of gold nations trying to force the United States back to the gold standard. The statement exploded over London—hence the term “bombshell”—and effectively ended the conference. Roosevelt’s first foray onto the world stage had seemingly backfired, as European leaders denounced his presumption, and Roosevelt realized that the rubber-stamping he had enjoyed from the American Congress was not universal. “No such message was ever before sent by the head of a government to representatives of other nations,” wrote a British official. “It will be filed for all times as a classic example of conceit, hectoring and ambiguity.”
For his part, Roosevelt claimed victory, explaining that the gold bloc nations that dominated the conference were trying to force a return to the gold standard when it was not in the best interest of the United States to do so, and that these same nations were “unwilling to go to the root of national and international problems.” In any case, the bombshell destroyed the conference that had been designed to establish secure trade agreements and stabilize the world’s currency. Roosevelt was left without the Disarmament Treaty and with a lot of disaffected and distrustful former allies. The only foreign leader apparently pleased by Roosevelt was Hitler. The Nazis praised Roosevelt “because they see the end of any united front against Germany,” the New York Times reported.
“You have opportunities for experiment which we do not have here,” British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald wrote to Roosevelt. “… To pull out a brick, to see what is behind or to get at some rotten bit of structure, is as dangerous in the State as I have just found out it is in my own delightful old house which is beginning to show signs of its two centuries of years.”
Roosevelt’s cable landed like a bombshell at home as well. Eleanor was disappointed in her husband. “As ER feared most, a great opportunity for international leadership had been lost,” her biographer wrote. “Her husband had failed to take a risk for peace. Rearmament and economic nationalism would forevermore rule the day.”
Throughout the spring of 1933, Eleanor had clipped articles about Hitler’s escalating war on Jews for her husband. Jewish men and women were randomly beaten in the streets. Union leaders were being arrested. Nazis made funeral pyres of books written by Jewish, liberal, and Communist authors, including Albert Einstein, Upton Sinclair, and Thomas Mann. Jewish shop owners were seized by Nazi storm troopers, stripped of their clothes to reveal their circumcisions, and brutalized. Nazis had burned the Reichstag and raided Jewish-owned stores. Jewish judges and lawyers were evicted from the courts and professors ejected from universities while Hitler instituted new classes in “science and race.” The first concentration camp had been constructed at Dachau. More than fifty thousand people poured into the streets of New York City to protest Hitler, and American Jews called for a boycott of German goods.
American journalists were slow to respond to the Nazi persecution of Jews. “Our ignorance was inexcusable,” a wire-service correspondent in Germany later said. “All of us in the west, our political leaders and our newspapers above all, had underestimated Adolf Hitler and his domination of this land and its people.” One of the first American writers to take Hitler seriously was muckraking Philadelphia Record reporter I. F. Stone, who warned about Hitler’s rise as early as 1932: “Today or tomorrow the shifty-eyed little Austrian paperhanger, Hitler, may step into the mighty shoes of Bismarck as Chancellor of the Reich.” In the spring of 1933, Stone wrote that the “danger to Europe and the world is that he may seek a way out in war.” Stone’s unease was in stark contrast to the response of Walter Lippmann, called America’s “most stately Jewish pundit” by Time magazine, who depreciated Hitler’s bellicosity as “Europe’s problem.” Had Lippmann—one of the most powerful and widely read journalists in the country, and one who wielded great influence with Roosevelt—turned his attention to Hitler, he might have molded public opinion in a decisive way while also nudging the president toward a more internationalist policy. “Lippmann had no illusions about Hitler’s territorial ambitions or his ruthlessness,” wrote his biographer Ronald Steel. “Yet he showed a surprising insensitivity to the human dimension of the Nazi threat, especially as it concerned the Jews.” Following Lippmann’s lead, Time also urged calm, explaining comfortingly that a “dictator, once he feels secure in the saddle, always tries to curb and discipline his followers who have invariably run more or less amuck.”
The owner of the New York Herald Tribune, Helen Rogers Reid—a dear friend of Eleanor’s, who was a liberal and a feminist despite being a Republican—was one of the first American publishers to give the Nazi crisis priority coverage. In March 1933, the paper’s magazine section carried a lengthy analysis called “Hitler’s War on Culture” by a leading German intellectual. “The universities of Germany have been transformed into hotbeds of extreme nationalism,” wrote the German-Jewish novelist Dr. Lion Feuchtwanger. “The apostles of Fascism … have made man’s worst instincts their god and they have stirred senseless racial hatred to fever pitch. They declare that the Jews are to blame for everything. Hitler declares that ‘the Jews have conquered Europe and America,’ and are now embarked on an effort to conquer Asia.” Eleanor was intensely affected by Feuchtwanger’s article and its revelations of hatred, racism, and anti-Semitism, and she relentlessly urged her isolationist husband to make peace and disarmament the centerpiece of his foreign policy.
Despite his reticence to challenge Hitler during these earliest days of the Nazis, Roosevelt was one of the first world leaders to recognize the global menace that Hitler posed. In 1933 alone he dispatched at least two emissaries to Germany to assess Hitler and the Nazis. On a flyleaf of an American edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, published in 1933, Roosevelt wrote: “This translation is so expurgated as to give a wholly false view of what Hitler really is or says.” Years later, Rex Tugwell told an interviewer that “from the moment Hitler came into power, Roosevelt regarded him with a strong, almost religious, dislike … [and thought him] a dangerous character standing against everything in which the United States believed.” In the spring of 1933, Roosevelt told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau that he considered it “a strong possibility” that Hitler planned to start a war in Europe. Roosevelt’s appeal to world leaders to halt construction of offensive weapons systems was a direct response to the aggressions of Hitler’s new Nazi government. He already envisioned the possible necessity of a future pact with other European nations to eventually contain Hitler. For now, he saw disarmament as a first crucial step toward that end.
“I am concerned by events in Germany,” Roosevelt wrote to Prime Minister MacDonald after the economic conference collapsed. “For I feel that an insane rush to further armaments in Continental Europe is infinitely more dangerous than any number of squabbles over gold or stabilization or tar
iffs.”
Chapter Thirty-one
A Rainbow of Colored Shirts
Hitler’s Brown Shirts and Mussolini’s Black Shirts inspired America’s right wing to form its own paramilitary organizations. J. Edgar Hoover had repeatedly and consistently warned President Roosevelt that the Bonus Army was a dangerous collection of Socialists and Communists intent on taking over the government. While both the American Fascist and Communist movements were burgeoning in response to the crisis of the early 1930s, whatever radical elements had existed within the Bonus Army had coalesced into a Fascist rather than Communist movement.
Calling themselves the Khaki Shirts, and openly emulating the Brown Shirts and Black Shirts, this reactionary core of veterans posed an actual threat to the U.S. government and the Roosevelt administration—J. Edgar Hoover’s myopic assessment notwithstanding. The self-styled “general” of the Khaki Shirts, alternately referred to as the U.S. Fascists, was enamored with the autocratic leaders of Germany and Italy. Arthur J. Smith founded the Khaki Shirts in Philadelphia, recruiting pro-Mussolini immigrants and vowing to build “the strongest army, navy and air corps in the world.” Espousing Fascism as the only escape from economic injustice and global depression, Smith in June 1933 claimed to have assembled one and a half million men who were prepared to take control of Washington, remove Roosevelt, and establish a dictatorship. When word spread that he planned to lead his army in a takeover of Pennsylvania’s National Guard arsenal, Philadelphia police moved in. Smith met what a historian called his “slapstick Waterloo” when the police stormed the Khaki Shirts headquarters and “captured the entire putative army.” Smith fashioned a dramatic escape through a window. One of his followers was killed, which provided Smith with the pro-Fascist martyrdom he sought. He “staged a well-publicized funeral,” according to one account, and moved his “army” north.
