Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Hitler made each insignificant, poverty-stricken, jobless youth of the slums feel himself one of the great of the earth … a Nordic, far superior to the successful Jew…. Hitler told the young men that the fate of Germany was in their hands, that if they joined his army they would battle with the Communists for the streets, they would see Jewish blood flow in streams, they would … deliver Germany from the Versailles Treaty and then sweep triumphantly over the borders to reconquer Germany’s lost land. He put them into uniforms, he taught them to march and sing together….

  They really believe that Hitler will bring about a genuine socialism without class warfare….

  As a physician, Hamilton was particularly appalled by the movement against doctors “accused of being individualistic and treating their patients as individuals.” “True German doctors” were now expected “to work only as part of the state,” and “must concern themselves with the problem of race purity. They must help decide which babies are to be killed at birth and which permitted to live, and which people are to be sterilized.”

  All spring, the most fantastic outrages occurred in formerly liberal Berlin. For Hamilton, the student assault against Magnus Hirschfield’s Institute of the Science of Sex was stunning. The father of sexology, a Jewish physician, a homosexual, and a liberal activist, Hirschfield saw thirty years of research destroyed; “A procession of students in white shirts (for purity) drove to the institute in trucks … and at a blare of trumpets they entered the library of the institute, seized books and pamphlets, threw them into the trucks,” and consigned all the papers and books to “purifying flames.”

  Students were “passionately behind the new movement… against all that the German universities had stood for. The burning of the books was their work and they were proud of it….”

  Hamilton did not understand why people were surprised by Hitler’s methods and aims: Everything that happened in Germany since 30 January was clearly forecast in his 1923 book, Mein Kampf: “There is no mystery about him,” and he was precise about “what he meant to do, all of it, from the prohibition of Cubism in art to the swallowing up of Austria, from the driving of Jews out of the singing societies to the abolition of the trades-unions. …”

  Hamilton was particularly eager for people to understand Hitler’s theory of propaganda, which was carefully explained, and she felt every leader of public opinion should take it seriously. Propaganda was to be aimed at “the most limited intelligence.” The more people to be reached, the “lower it must go.” It must be simple, direct, uncluttered. “It is a mistake to give one’s followers too many adversaries to fight. That bewilders them and arouses doubt. One adversary only must be offered to their hate, and the same again and again.” Hatred of the Jew is the glue that keeps it all together. It is the “subject he cannot keep away from. There are pages and pages that drip with hatred of the Jew in language too vile to reproduce.”

  Also to be destroyed are the “mischlinges,” the mixed-bloods, responsible for “the loss of race purity, that has brought about the decline of all great nations.” Not only Jews but Slavic and Alpine races are inferior, although on diplomatic grounds Magyars and Finns were deemed Aryans.

  Hitler’s foreign policy was written far into the future: The rule of the world now belongs to Aryan races. Germany needs land which is held by inferior peoples—land to the east: Poland, Ukraine, central and southern Russia. Some have advised an alliance with Russia, but that is impossible because the Jews are there—and the Jew is “only a ferment of decomposition.” “Germany cannot ally with Jewry, which through Bolshevism seeks to rule the world.”

  Hamilton forecast Hitler’s effort to ally with England, which would have happened earlier “had it not been for Germany’s mistaken policy of trade rivalry and colonization.”

  Above all, Hamilton concluded, the world must see that “Hitler is a soldier…. Force is all he respects.” “He loves rough, red-blooded words— ‘relentless,’ ‘steely,’ ‘iron-hearted,’ ‘brutal’; his favorite phrase is ‘ruthless brutality.’” He wants Germany turned entirely away from “modern life” and “achievements of the human mind, back to the days when physical force ruled the world.”

  During her last days in Germany, it began to feel “unreal, nightmarish.” Hamilton wrote Jane Addams en route home:

  Do you remember [vertebrate paleontologist] Tilly Edinger, a spirited young thing we met [in Frankfurt] in 1919. Her mother [Anna] was the one who founded the “Air Baths” in the parks, where we saw those pitiful starved children. Tilly’s father [Ludwig, a neurologist who had been Hamilton’s professor] founded the Neurological Institute of the university. Tilly is a gifted young scientist who worked in the Neurological Institute. … When we saw her she had been formally expelled…. The night before a beloved old couple, her mother’s uncle and his wife, had killed themselves. They had seen everything go, their grandchildren forced out of school, their sons deciding to go to Belgium … they themselves were told that they were not Germans but foreigners and a curse to the country and they decided death was better. He was a great benefactor to Frankfurt and founded the astronomical department, in recognition of which a little planet was named for him “Mauritius.” …

  If only we could open our doors to these people, they are so fine, but of course we cannot.

  Unlike Catt, who promoted James McDonald’s work on behalf of refugees, Hamilton failed to promote changes in U.S. refugee policy. Although she knew that events continued to worsen with lightning speed, she did not believe that FDR could “make a formal protest any more than Germany could formally protest against the last Maryland lynching.”

  What was there then to do? Within five days of Hamilton’s visit, FDR sent his first letter to Ramsay MacDonald since the London Economic Conference: “I am concerned by events in Germany.” FDR feared the growing militarism throughout Europe and considered it “infinitely more dangerous than any number of squabbles over gold or stabilization or tariffs.” Perhaps when the Geneva disarmament meetings resumed in September, some multilateral agreements might be achieved after all.

  MacDonald replied vaguely, since he was in “a complete state of depression” and reported to be “inconsolable” after the crash of the London Conference. In any case, during the autumnal meetings Germany walked out of the Geneva Disarmament Conference, and quit the League of Nations on 14 October 1933.

  ER remained in close touch with Alice Hamilton and Carrie Chapman Catt, and she spoke at events they arranged. Catt intensified her efforts that autumn: She traveled the country speaking to university and civic groups, and formed a committee to persuade FDR to ease immigration restrictions for Germany’s desperate refugees.

  Actually, America’s immigration restrictions emboldened Hitler, and he said so publicly. In April 1933, he declared: “Through its immigration law America has inhibited the unwelcome influx of such races as it has been unable to tolerate.” With no international expression of dismay or even concern, Hitler’s policies hardened: On 15 July 1933, The New York Times quoted Hitler’s Volkischer Beobachter:

  We merely wish to state that the United States possesses rigorous immigration laws while Germany has absolutely none thus far. We further point to American relations with Negroes—social and political. And finally, certain American universities have long since excluded Jews.

  On 10 September 1933, Catt’s efforts were supplemented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) committee of thirty-six members—including Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Roger Baldwin, Reinhold Niebuhr, and FDR’s own friend Felix Frankfurter—who appealed to the president to change immigration laws “to admit religious and political refugees, particularly from Germany, in harmony with the American tradition of asylum for refugees escaping from foreign tyrannies.”

  When, in October 1933, the League of Nations created an International Commission on Refugees, Catt, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., and others asked FDR to nominate James G. McDonald to chair the high commission. He agreed, the League of N
ations ratified his appointment, and McDonald worked for two years to get the United States to liberalize its refugee policy and join an international agreement on refugees.

  ER supported McDonald’s efforts and joined Catt’s activities to keep the refugee issue prominent. She continued to bring information and individuals like Hamilton directly to her husband, intensified her work for women’s rights and international peace, and began to speak to Jewish groups as never before.

  Above all, as racial and religious bigotry raged through Europe, ER turned her attention to the racial and religious bigotry that permeated U.S. relations, and to issues of poverty and despair—which, she said, fueled Europe’s fascist fervor.

  On 18 August 1933, ER sent her first letter of appeal for racial justice: She had been told by an African-American registrant that Camp Tera, the first CCC camp for women, “did not want colored girls.”

  W. H. Matthews, director of New York’s Emergency Work Bureau, which presided over the camp, replied that “in the first small group … there were no colored girls.” But now there were ten, and there was a no-discrimination policy. The objection reminded Matthews of other protests: Democrats say that we favor Republicans, Socialists that we favor both Republicans and Democrats, and Communists that we favor “everybody save them.” In fact, “we go along doing the best we can for everybody, which just now is a poor best,” because the budget was inadequate.

  ER replied: “I know you are doing your best and I know how difficult it must be. I only sent you word about the colored girls because I thought it unfair….”

  In response to bigotry abroad, ER pursued fairness and justice in America. Because she failed for so long to mention specifically the crises Jews faced in Germany, it seemed as if she were on that subject actually muzzled: a prisoner of the administration’s policy of absolute noninvolvement in the internal affairs of other nations. The situation in Germany, however, radicalized her views about what needed to be done in America.

  After ER wrote her first letter concerning race, she drove to West Virginia, where she met Hick and Clarence Pickett, head of the American Friends Service Committee, for a tour of one of America’s most impoverished areas. That day marked the beginning of ER’s remarkable partnership with Pickett and the AFSC, which embraced both national and international concerns and spurred ER on to new levels of activism. After August 1933, ER dedicated herself to providing a life of dignity and decency for all Americans, first in an extraordinary experiment in sustainable community, or “subsistence homesteading,” in a small West Virginia settlement called Arthurdale.

  * Known as the “Texas Cyclone,” Pennybacker had been a friend of ER’s since 1924. Leader of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, director of the Chautauqua Club since 1916, a devoted peace activist who worked closely with Carrie Chapman Catt and ER on World Court efforts, she was also a prominent Texas Democrat.

  8: Creating a New Community

  On the morning of 18 August, ER drove alone to Morgantown, West Virginia, in response to Hick’s plea that she see conditions in this area for herself. During Hick’s first week at work she had gone to Philadelphia to meet Clarence Pickett, whose American Friends Service Committee had initiated several projects in the area. He told her that if she wanted to see the most serious ravages of the Depression she should visit the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania and go into West Virginia.

  In Uniontown, Pennsylvania, where steel mills had been shut down for years, she found workers living in abandoned coke ovens. Stores were empty; nobody had any money. But not until Hick reached the Scott’s Run area in Monongalia County, West Virginia, did she fully understand how horrible poverty could be.

  Scott’s “run” referred to the malodorous green, red, and yellow stream of mine and human waste that ran down the hillsides and through the valley into the Monongahela River. Hick was not the only visitor stunned by “the damndest cesspool of human misery … in America.” In 1931 and 1932 when AFSC staffers began work throughout the thirty-eight coalfield counties in response to Hoover’s relief efforts and an appeal by Grace Abbott of the Children’s Bureau, they found 95 percent of the children in Monongalia County suffered from various curable but intense blights: malnutrition, defective vision, rickets, rotten teeth. The Friends introduced soap, toothbrushes, food programs, visiting nurses, social workers, garden and craft projects. But it was just a beginning, as Hick’s report revealed:

  Morgantown was the worst place I’d ever seen. In a gutter, along the main street through the town, there was stagnant, filthy water, which the inhabitants used for drinking, cooking, washing, and everything else imaginable. On either side of the street were ramshackle houses, black with coal dust, which most Americans would not have considered fit for pigs. And in those houses every night children went to sleep hungry, on piles of bug-infested rags, spread out on the floor.

  The needs were monumental. There was no clinic, no free hospital bed, anywhere in West Virginia. In Logan, there was a diphtheria epidemic. A little girl needed to have a tube inserted into her throat to enable her to breathe. It was done in a garage.

  Part of the problem was that most of the miners had been unionists who were blacklisted after a brutal series of strikes and lockouts between 1924 and 1931. Mining families were destitute, stranded; some companies were bankrupt; there was almost no work. Homeless and hungry, fifteen thousand people in the coal mining sections lived in tents and abandoned company hovels. By 1933 “the tents were so old and tattered that they provided practically no shelter at all.” Some of the unionists were communists, and the mine owners had vowed they would never work again. Many had been idle for eight years.

  In addition to strikes and antiunion violence, the coal industry had over-expanded, and prices had crashed; many of the mines were depleted, and technological changes, notably the diesel engine for locomotives, limited the need for the area’s famous steam coal. The AFSC estimated that 200,000 miners were permanently out of work, while 300,000 “were employed only sporadically.”

  Hick’s reports inspired ER: “What a power you have to feel and to describe. … How small one’s worries seem in comparison to what so many human beings have been through….”

  When ER arrived in Morgantown, Clarence Pickett and Hick were there to meet her. Together they toured the area, visited families in the process of starving to death. Nobody knew who she was. Some, suspicious and fearful, turned away. But most were eager to talk, and many told her of their lives honestly, directly.

  ER wrote a searing political column for the Women’s Democratic News upon her return from West Virginia. She had personally heard of investigations in these “mining communities as far back as 1915.” But “the reports were simply pigeonholed,” and conditions continually worsened. What ER had now witnessed convinced her that the time for reports and timid talk were over: Workers in America had a right to “receive in return for their labor, at least a minimum of security and happiness in life. They must have enough to eat, warmth, adequate clothing, decent shelter and an opportunity for education.” She continued:

  I do not believe if most of us knew the conditions under which some of our brothers and sisters were living that we would rest complacently until we had registered the fact that in this country the day is past when we will continue to live under any governmental system which will produce conditions such as exist in certain industries and in certain parts of our country.

  ER worried that if peaceful change were not agreed to, “because we recognize the justice of what should be done,” the U.S. would suffer the revolutionary upheavals experienced by other nations, since “it is misery that drives people to the point where they are willing to overthrow anything simply because life as it is is not worth living any longer.”

  In one house, she witnessed six hungry children who had nothing to eat but scraps, “the kind that you or I might give to a dog.” Two of the children “gathered enough courage to stand by the door,” where their little brother held a white
rabbit tightly to his chest.

  It was evident it was a most cherished pet. The little girl was thin and scrawny, and had a gleam in her eyes as she looked at her brother. Turning to me she said: “He thinks we are not going to eat it, but we are,” and at that the small boy fled down the road clutching the rabbit closer than ever.

  ER told that story frequently to raise money from her affluent friends and various White House guests for the community she worked to build for the desperate families of West Virginia. It even eased a $100 check out of William C. Bullitt, who said he hoped it might save that little rabbit.

  To the First Lady, orphaned and uprooted from a home of her own, who for so long wanted a home that belonged to neither her mother-in-law nor the state, affordable housing became a lifelong crusade. During the first White House years she devoted some hours in almost every day to the creation of a model community to be located fifteen miles from Morgantown, just outside a little town called Reedsville.

  ER was shameless about asking for donations, in time and money. And she wrote about it at every opportunity:

  I came to know very well a stream near Morgantown called Scott’s Run, or Bloody Run because of the violent strikes … in the mines there….

  I took many, many people to see this village of Jere, West Virginia, along Scott’s Run, for it was a good example of what absentee ownership could do as far as human beings were concerned…. Some of the children were sub-normal, and I often wondered how any of them grew up….

  It was quite usual to find all the older children sleeping on bags or rags on the floor and the mother and father and youngest children in the only bed, which might or might not have a mattress. Sometimes there was just a blanket over the springs. The WPA mattress project helped considerably, as did the building of sanitary privies.