The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Eleanor Roosevelt suffered a loss of her own that same month. Hall Roosevelt, the younger brother for whom she’d felt responsible since the early deaths of their parents, died in a Washington hospital as she sat helpless at his bedside. He had been bright and promising when young, filled with all the Roosevelt energy, and had become an able engineer and city official. But the curse of alcoholism that had killed his father destroyed him, too.

  “My idea of hell if I believed in it,” Eleanor confided to her friend Joe Lash before the end came, “would be to sit … and watch someone breathing hard, struggling for words when a gleam of consciousness returns and thinking ‘this was once the little boy I played with and scolded, he could have been so much and this is what he is.’ ”

  On the morning of September 29—less than two weeks after her mother-in-law died, just two days after burying her brother—Eleanor left the White House grounds without an escort and walked eight blocks north to Dupont Circle to a brand-new office and a brand-new job. New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, director of the newly created Office of Civilian Defense, had asked her to become his unsalaried assistant in charge of civilian volunteers.

  She saw her new job as a chance to keep the spirit of the New Deal alive—even under the threat of war. Effective defense, she insisted, demanded “better nutrition, better housing, better day-to-day medical care, better education, better recreation for every age.”

  But she quickly ran into trouble. Federal agencies resisted incursions onto their territory. Southern mayors resented her determination to recruit black as well as white volunteers. When she hired a dancer friend to help with physical training, Congress passed a resolution meant to ridicule her by banning the use of public funds for “fan-dancing.”

  “Mrs. Roosevelt,” a Michigan woman wrote to her, “you would be doing a great service if you would simply go home and sew for the Red Cross. Every time you open your mouth the people of this country dislike and mistrust you more.”

  Within four months Eleanor Roosevelt would feel she had no choice but to resign. “People can … understand that an individual, even if she is a President’s wife, may have independent views and must be allowed the expression of an opinion,” she told a friend. “But actual participation in the work of the government, we are not yet able to accept.”

  Hall Roosevelt as a small boy, for whom Eleanor believed herself responsible

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  Eleanor and Hall in 1933, after he had been appointed comptroller of the city of Detroit

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  Hall in January of 1941, attending his brother-in-law’s third inaugural ball, just a few months before cirrhosis of the liver killed him

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  Eleanor and Fiorello La Guardia at the Office of Civilian Defense on the day she was sworn in as his assistant, September 29, 1941

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  Mayris Chaney meets the press on the day her friend the first lady appointed her to develop a recreational dance program for children in bomb shelters. A vaudeville performer who had entertained at the White House and invented a dance called the “Eleanor Glide,” she was maligned on the House floor as a “strip-teaser.”

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  “Those Americans sure can attack … themselves!” The cartoonist Theodore Seuss Geisel, better known as “Dr. Seuss,” criticized the first lady’s critics in the liberal newspaper PM in early 1942.

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  Whatever Is Asked of Us

  On Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor. All afternoon news reports repeated the same meager information. The president did not plan to address Congress until the following day.

  But that evening, on her weekly radio program, it fell to the first lady of the United States to try to reassure her frightened fellow citizens about what lay ahead.

  Ladies and gentlemen, I’m speaking to you at a very serious moment in our history. The Cabinet is convening and the leaders in Congress are meeting with the President. The State Department and Army and Navy officials have been with the President all afternoon.

  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—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.

  I should like to say just a word to the women in the country tonight. I have a boy at sea on a destroyer, for all I know he may be on his way to the Pacific.… Many of you all over this country have boys in the services who will now be called upon to go into action.… You cannot escape a clutch of fear at your heart and yet I hope … you [will] rise above these fears.

  Whatever is asked of us I am sure we can accomplish it. We are the free and unconquerable people of the United States of America.

  The president was grim but relieved that evening. “You know,” the secretary of the navy said to Frances Perkins, “I think the boss must have a great load off his mind. I thought the load on his mind was just going to kill him.… At least we know what to do now.”

  Americans had broken the Japanese code, and Roosevelt had known an attack in the Pacific was imminent. But he had expected it to be launched against British and Dutch outposts, not Hawaii. He appeared before Congress the following day.

  Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.

  Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.

  Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.

  Last night the Japanese attacked Wake Island.

  And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

  Japan has therefore undertaken a surprise offensive, extending throughout the Pacific area. …

  I ask that the Congress declare a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

  On December 11, Hitler and Mussolini, siding with their Japanese ally, declared war on the United States. That same day, surrounded by senators and congressmen of both parties, FDR would sign the declaration of war.

  Alice Longworth’s initial reaction to the attack on Pearl Harbor had been characteristically acid. “Well, friends,” she told some luncheon guests, “Franklin asked for it, now he’s got it.” But two weeks after Pearl Harbor, fifty-four-year-old Ted Roosevelt had asked to see the president and then told the press, “This is our country, our war and our president.” He had long since resigned from America First and was already in uniform as commander of his old outfit, the 26th Infantry.

  All four of FDR’s sons had volunteered. So did all three of Theodore Roosevelt’s surviving sons. Six of TR’s grandsons, who were old enough to serve, signed on, as well. “It seems to me,” Archie Roosevelt wrote FDR, “that regardless of the bitterness that many people feel toward the ‘Hyde Park’ Roosevelts or the ‘Oyster Bay’ Roosevelts, they have to admit that the whole clan has turned out to a man.… It is [something] in which I think we can take a certain amount of pride.”

  Black smoke pours from wrecked American warships, including the battleships USS West Virginia and USS Tennessee, at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. Eighteen American ships were destroyed or heavily damaged that morning; 188 airplanes were destroyed on the ground; and 2,340 U.S. servicemen and 48 civilians were killed.

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  White House reporters race for the telephones with official word of the Japanese attack.

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  Eleanor Roosevelt in the studio from which she spoke to the American people on Sunday evening, December 7, 1941. She had been broadcasting every Sunday since October on a program sponsored by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau and carried by more NBC outlets across the country than the popular comedy program Fibber McGee and Molly.

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  The first page of the first draft of FDR’s address
to Congress, with emendations in his bold hand

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  Grim-faced New Yorkers, many with hats over their hearts, crowd into City Hall Park to hear the president’s words, December 8, 1941.

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  Four days after Pearl Harbor, the president, wearing a black mourning band in honor of his late mother, looks over the declarations of war against Germany and Japan just enacted by Congress and signed by him.

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  Nothing to Conceal

  On December 22, 1941—just three weeks and a day since Pearl Harbor—the White House had a surprise guest: Winston Churchill, at considerable risk, had crossed the Atlantic to confer with Franklin Roosevelt. FDR had neglected to tell his wife Churchill was coming until that morning. “It had not occurred to him,” she complained, that “this might require certain moving of furniture to adapt rooms for the purposes for which the Prime Minister wished to use them.”

  The White House had changed since December 7. Armed sentries now kept tourists off the grounds. There were machine gun emplacements on the roof and blackout curtains over the windows.

  The prime minister would be the Roosevelts’ guest for three weeks. At one of their first dinners, FDR raised his glass to “the common cause, which I can now truly say is a common cause.” “We live here as a big family,” Churchill wired to Clement Attlee, “and I have formed the very highest regard and admiration for the President.” Night after night, the two men sat up until two or three in the morning. Churchill needed little sleep but lots of alcohol: sherry before breakfast; Scotch and soda before lunch; champagne and brandy in the evening.

  Eleanor Roosevelt disapproved of the drinking and the late hours and worried about the prime minister’s unshakable devotion to the sprawling British empire, which both she and her husband believed should not be allowed to survive long after the war. But she liked him. He and her husband, she said, “looked like boys playing soldier. They seemed to be having a wonderful time.”

  Once, according to Harry Hopkins, the president came up with what he thought was a grand idea: the twenty-six countries now pledged to subscribe to the principles of the Atlantic Charter should be called the “United Nations.” He had himself wheeled across the hall and entered his distinguished guest’s bedroom without knocking so that he could tell him about it. Churchill had just climbed out of the bathtub, naked, pink, and gleaming. FDR apologized for bursting in. Nothing to apologize for, Churchill said. “The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal from the President of the United States.”

  Roosevelt and Churchill received the war news together. It was all bad. In the Pacific theater, Japanese troops had landed in Thailand and Singapore, Burma and Borneo, Hong Kong and the Philippines—where they were driving American forces down the Bataan Peninsula. The American public was clamoring for revenge.

  On the other side of the globe, the Germans occupied almost all of Europe and were threatening Egypt and the Suez Canal in North Africa, engaging the Russians along a thousand-mile front, and sinking Allied ships in the North Atlantic faster than they could be replaced.

  Before Churchill returned to Britain, Roosevelt and he agreed that Germany, with its vast armies and mighty industrial machine, would have to be defeated first. But it would take time to mobilize, train, and equip a force powerful enough to destroy Hitler’s armies. Until then, the Allies would have to remain on the defensive in the Pacific.

  On February 23, FDR spoke to the country for the first time since Pearl Harbor. More than sixty-one million adults tuned in—80 percent of those who had access to a radio. He asked his listeners to have a world map at hand so that he could explain what was happening where, and what “the overall strategy has to be.”

  The United States was fighting “a new kind of war,” he told them, fought on “every continent, every island, every sea, every air-lane in the world.” The months ahead would not be easy. Sacrifices would be required of everyone. “But your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst without flinching or losing heart.” And once America’s productive genius was fully mobilized, Roosevelt told his listeners, it would provide the Allies “the overwhelming superiority of military materiel necessary for ultimate triumph.… From Berlin, and Tokyo and Rome, we have been described as a Nation of weaklings, playboys, who would hire British soldiers, or Russian soldiers, or Chinese soldiers to do our fighting for us. [L]et them tell that to General MacArthur and his men.… Let them tell it to the boys in the Flying Fortresses. Let them tell that to the Marines!”

  The speech was so effective, so reassuring, that an old friend urged Roosevelt to speak more often over the radio. FDR demurred: “The one thing I dread is that my talks should be so frequent as to lose their effectiveness.”

  On December 23, 1941, reporters crowd into the Oval Office for a joint press conference by the American president and the British prime minister—so many reporters that those in back were unable to see Winston Churchill. He accommodated them by climbing onto his chair and waving his cigar while they broke into applause. Did he think the war was now “turning in our favor?” he was asked. “I can’t describe the feelings of relief with which I find … the United States and Great Britain standing side by side. It is incredible to anyone who has lived through the months of 1940.… Thank God.” “How long will it take to lick these boys?” another reporter asked. Once Steve Early had explained to Churchill what “licked” meant in American jargon, he was happy to answer: “If we manage it well, it will take only half as long as if we manage it badly.”

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  FDR and Churchill at the lighting of the White House Christmas tree. The Secret Service had urged the president to cancel the event, but he insisted on going ahead with it as a sign of continuity in wartime. “This is a strange Christmas Eve,” Churchill told the crowd of twenty thousand. “Almost the whole world is locked in deadly struggle, and, with the most terrible weapons which science can devise, the nations advance upon each other.” But for this one night, he continued, “the cares and dangers that beset us” should “be cast aside: Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.”

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  Winston Churchill, flanked by British and American security men, strides toward the U.S. Capitol, where he was to address a joint session of Congress, December 26, 1941. In his speech, he questioned the sanity of the rulers of Japan: “What kind of people do they think we are?” he asked. “Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?” Senators and congressmen, Republicans as well as Democrats, rose and roared their approval.

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  On the evening of February 23, 1942, FDR reenacts for the newsreel cameras a portion of the radio address he has just finished. In it, he explained that “the broad oceans which have been heralded in the past as our protection from attack have become endless battlefields.”

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  A mother and grandmother in Singapore weep over children killed by Japanese bombs. The fall of the prize British colony—and the surrender of eighty thousand British and colonial troops there—on February 15, 1942, was nearly as devastating to the British as Pearl Harbor had been to Americans. It was “a heavy and far-reaching military defeat,” Churchill told his people, but also an opportunity to demonstrate their “quality and their genius.”

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  Executive Order 9066

  Within hours of Pearl Harbor, FDR issued identical proclamations authorizing the arrest and detention of any German, Italian, or Japanese noncitizens thought to
be a threat to American security. All “enemy aliens” were required to register and were forbidden to own weapons, cameras, or shortwave radios or to move about after dark. Some eleven thousand Germans and more than three thousand Italians would be detained over the course of the war. Italians were officially struck from the enemy alien list on Columbus Day, 1943; “I don’t care about the Italians,” FDR told his attorney general, Francis Biddle. “They are a lot of opera singers.”

  But Japanese aliens—and American citizens of Japanese descent—living along the West Coast received far harsher treatment. On February 19, 1942, FDR signed Executive Order 9066. Its tone was carefully neutral: it authorized the War Department to designate “military areas” and then exclude anyone from them whom it felt to be a danger. But all the people of Japanese ancestry living along the West Coast were the real target. “A Jap’s a Jap,” said General John L. DeWitt, of the Western Defense Command. “It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not. I don’t want any of them.” His views mirrored those of many West Coast whites, whose resentment of hardworking Japanese immigrants and their offspring was decades old.

  Over the course of the next few months, somewhere between 110,000 and 120,000 men, women, and children, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens whom the government renamed “non-aliens” to make their treatment seem less egregious, would be forced from their homes and businesses and interned in one or another of ten camps scattered across seven states. Armed guards and barbed wire ensured that no one got out.

  Almost no one protested the government’s plan, which also initially classified all Japanese Americans as unfit for military service. (Later, young internees would be allowed to form their own segregated outfit, the much-honored 442nd Regimental Combat Team.)