One of FDR’s loyal constituents, Mrs. S. Miller of East Orange, New Jersey, sent ER a clipping from The Jewish Examiner. Because she considered the First Lady “one of the most understanding and tolerant persons we have in this country today,” Mrs. Miller considered it urgent to send the enclosed information:
There is no doubt in my mind that under President Roosevelt’s administration the security of the Jewish people is protected. However, it is equally important that for future peace and safety the present day hatred and propaganda against the Jewish people should not be encouraged.
I am enclosing a report I just read to explain my writing this letter.
The Jewish Examiner emphasized the participation of self-styled U.S. patriots, including “branches of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars” who joined forces with the “Friends of New Germany, as the American branch of the German Nazi Party prefers to be known.” The meeting was dedicated to a “ ‘hate the Jew’ program,” and speakers “promised” a Nazi candidate in the next presidential election.
Between Heil Hitlers and the Horst Wessel anthem, greetings “from President Roosevelt were read to the assemblage,” to wild applause.
ER replied: “I read your letter with interest and will make every effort to see that the Nazi movement is discouraged.”
The week after FDR sent his letter of greeting to Madison Square Garden, ER spoke to fifteen hundred women gathered to support Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization of America, at their 16 October convention dinner in Washington. Accompanied by Elinor Morgenthau, ER praised Hadassah’s achievements in Palestine, and presented “ ‘a word of greeting’ from the president, which was received with applause.”
The featured speaker of the evening, Rabbi Milton Steinberg of New York’s Park Avenue Synagogue, emphasized European Jewry’s “completely impossible” situation and the need to “build a social order which shall be an expression of Jewish idealism” in Palestine. In her brief remarks, ER emphasized “the tasks to be done in this country by American women, Jews and Gentiles,” working together “side by side.” “We must not let barriers grow up between us, but with good-will… [disregard] pettiness, unkindness and injustices for the things we want to see accomplished.”
Elinor Morgenthau tailored her remarks to honor her friendship with the First Lady and spoke of women’s unity. She urged delegates to remember that “in America discrimination against the Jew is the exception and not the rule.” She urged Hadassah women to be stalwart. “Don’t live in fear of false accusation. In spite of criticism, don’t trim your sails. Be true to yourselves and walk the world with dignity.”
ER’s silence concerning what Louise Wise had called that “subject which engrosses us now” grew louder. In November, she turned aside an amazingly stark appeal by a woman who wrote from Oregon:
Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Will you please read the enclosed…. Is there nothing to do about this, wouldn’t a protest of prominent people of this country have any effect?…
Can you do anything?
With her letter, Alice Youngbar sent a copy of “Prisoner of the Nazis,” condensed from The New Republic by The Reader’s Digest. Written anonymously, and first published on 8 August 1934 with an editorial confirming its veracity and “the fact that the conditions described are continuing to the present day,” the article vividly detailed conditions at Dachau, Germany’s first major concentration camp:
At present it harbors about 1700 prisoners, mostly Communists or members of organizations known as sympathetic…. There are only about 40 Jews, mostly manual workers or clerks; some few… business men from small villages who had been arrested from motives of personal rancor or envy….
The Nazi commandant of the camp announced the camp’s policy: “Always remember that no human beings are here, only swine…. No one who does harm to a prisoner need fear reprimand….”
Impossibly unhealthy food rations, hard labor, and dispiriting abuse faced every inmate. “The cells are provided with a noose in case the prisoner wants to hang himself.” The filthy, cold, harrowing conditions people endured within Dachau were vividly detailed. Communist and Jewish prisoners were tortured for hours, beaten and mutilated:
[Communist parliamentarian] Deputy Fritz Dressel… tried to cut his wrist with a piece of glass, but he was discovered while he still showed some signs of life and was transferred to a first-aid station. A few hours later he was again “discovered,” lying in a pool of blood, his arms pulled out of their sockets. Schloss, a businessman from Nuremberg, was killed in less than three days by blows on the testicles. An attorney named Strauss, from Munich… was transformed into a quivering white-haired old man. They compelled him to swim in ice-cold water while they lashed him with oxtails. After four days of torture he was shot….
Other Jews were forced to scrub especially befouled toilets with their bare hands…. Despite the fact that the Commander promised that any prisoner who harmed a Jew would be released, the Jews received every kindness from the other prisoners….
The great majority of the Storm Troopers did not take part in the torturing. Some of the guards even had the courage openly to oppose it. They were placed in “protective custody.” Several of the Special Police sympathized with the prisoners, so that every third week the guard had to be changed, and only the most brutal were kept permanently at the camp.
With that article in her hands, an article thousands of Americans read in The Reader’s Digest, one can only imagine ER’s inner turmoil as she composed one formal sentence in reply to Alice Youngbar’s plea: “My dear Miss Young-bar: Unfortunately, what you have read is something which happens in Germany over which we have no control.”
ER’s understanding of “no control” short-circuited protest, even inquiry. She volunteered no private or public response to reported atrocities as they intensified between 1933 and 1938. As one searches the record for a hint of activity, a glimmer of concern, regarding the situation in Germany, one finds instead her many and amazing acts of personal generosity toward individual Jews in need or in trouble within the United States; her increased efforts against discrimination and racial violence domestically, where her influence might have some impact on public policy; and an intensified campaign to promote collective security.
ER at first sought to make a difference to one individual, one heart, at a time. Privately, throughout the 1930s, beginning with the Brodsky family, the First Lady contributed in countless ways to Jewish individuals and families she met in her travels and through correspondence.
Desperate to get help for his fourteen-year-old sister, Bertha, Frank Brodsky, then twenty-one, appealed to the First Lady: His sister needed an operation for scoliosis, the spinal disease suffered by ER’s Aunt Bye, which the family could not afford. His mother was unemployed, and his disabled father, who had lost an arm to a sawmill, had only a meager paper route. Moved by young Frank’s cry for help, ER traveled to Brooklyn to meet the family and arranged to have Bertha receive medical care at the Orthopedic Hospital on 59th Street, founded by her grandfather “Greatheart” Theodore Roosevelt.
Bertha spent ten months in the hospital, and the surgery was successful. On 7 February, ER visited and signed her diploma from the Straus Junior High School in Brooklyn. Subsequently, ER sent her cherries, candies, flowers, and books—with a request for secrecy since she could not send gifts to all the children there: “I do not like to have anyone’s feelings hurt, so I think the less we say about it the kinder it will be.”
Over the years they visited regularly, corresponded often. ER tried to find Frank a job first as a messenger at Milgrim’s and then in the Housing Division. She wrote Rexford Guy Tugwell:
I am interested in a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, and I am very anxious to get them settled on a homestead. There is a boy who is pretty well trained and who could do some clerical work. He is interested in housing.
Will you let me know if there is any chance in the future of getting a homestead for them?
In subsequent letters ER wrote insistently, though stereotypically, on Frank’s behalf: “This boy is particularly anxious to get some kind of a position in the housing division and would probably work as the Jews do when they work to improve themselves constantly.”
In scores of letters, ER worried about their mother’s declining health, Frank’s changing job prospects, their new and better flat. In 1936, ER sent Bertha to camp for two weeks. “I hope you will have a grand time and that it will do you lots of good.” Both Bertha and Frank visited the White House, and a lifelong friendship developed.
For all her enforced silence concerning Hitler’s policies, ER was outspoken about the scourge of war. From 1933 on she met with activists at the White House; gave galvanizing speeches; and earned a reputation as “the First Lady of the Peace Movement.”
She wanted the world to demilitarize in spirit as well as in actuality, and urged an end to war toys. In December 1933 she wrote a column for the Woman’s Home Companion to argue “that the glamour of the gorgeously dressed soldiers” created in children a memory of excitement, which might just as well be replaced by “armies of foresters and farmers.”
When members of the National Student Federation, representing college leaders of America, converged with the more radical students of the National Student League and the League for Industrial Democracy, she insisted they meet together. After her address, in which she emphasized the need to find “goals to replace the war impulse,” she answered a question by “a Negro student:”
It is natural to look upon war as glamorous, as showing supreme love and sacrifice for patriotic reasons. But it is just as patriotic and just as self-sacrificing to live for one’s country in a way to make it a help to the world and all the people in it….
ER acknowledged that it was “conceivable” that America might be “forced into war.” But every effort should be made to settle differences by “legal means.” There were always “warring interests and warring classes—people fighting for themselves.” But selfish interests and greed served no big interests: “We have believed in the individualistic thing. We can’t go on that way. We must work together on big things.”
Although ER supported the Nye Committee investigations and spoke out against military profiteering, she wrote nothing about the renewed military commerce under way. In May 1934, Hick reported from Ajo, Arizona, that a copper mine had opened, “putting 400 men to work, on orders for munitions plants in Europe and Japan.” Hick also wrote Harry Hopkins that another mine over one hundred miles from Ajo was reemploying workers, and the superintendent of the New Cornelia mine, near Tucson, “is telling his friends it’s all foreign munitions business.”
ER’s information that U.S. mining interests supplied Germany and Japan predated by six months FDR’s information from Dodd that war preparations in Germany were in high gear. In November 1934, Dodd and his son toured Bitterfeld, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Erfurt, and other places: “Every smokestack showed great activity…. [and] great preparation for war.” Consular reports indicated that “poison gas and explosives” were being produced; factories operated day and night; in Dresden a thousand new planes were reported.
There were many protests against U.S. trade with Germany and Italy in copper, steel, arms, oil, and munitions, and ER was convinced that only a blockade, real collective action, would prevent another war. Yet no serious boycott that included oil and other resources was even contemplated.
Despite Ethiopia’s fierce, unexpected, and costly resistance, Mussolini won. Afterward, he acknowledged that he could not have done so had it not been for the fact that both the United States and Britain continued to supply him with oil.
Instead of the development of a united front against aggression in Ethiopia, the League was diminished and Europe remilitarized. The Franco-Soviet Pact of May 1935 was followed almost immediately by the Anglo-German Naval Agreement in June. WILPF’s efforts to keep disarmament on the world’s agenda, which ER supported, were eclipsed by the League’s failure to respond to the war in Ethiopia—followed on 7 March 1936 by Germany’s occupation of the demilitarized Rhineland.
On 2 May 1936, Haile Selassie left Addis Ababa, and Italy’s African empire was now Italian East Africa and Italian Somaliland.
Then, on 18 July 1936, the Spanish Civil War exploded. Francisco Franco’s forces, hiding out in Africa, were transported in Italian and German planes and ships to crush Spain’s democratically elected Popular Front government. The Spanish Civil War claimed a significant part of ER’s attention for the next three years. But it was not the big international story that summer.
The Nazi Olympics of 1936 dominated the world’s attention. Fifty-three nations participated in the Berlin Games. Anguished at Nazi prohibitions against non-Aryan athletes and the exclusion of 35,000 Jewish athletes who were no longer citizens and whose clubs could not participate in training or tryouts, various athletic groups and veteran Olympic officials in the United States called for a boycott.
U.S. artists and writers also demanded a boycott of the Olympics art exhibition. George Biddle introduced a resolution at the First American Artists’ Congress that was unanimously adopted: American artists would have nothing to do with “a government which sponsors the destruction of all freedom in art,… which sponsors racial discrimination, the censorship of free speech and free expression, and the glorification of war, hatred and sadism.”
Both ER and FDR ignored the boycott effort. Neither Spain nor Russia sent athletes. Ironically, alternative games were planned for Spain, but were canceled by Franco’s Nazi-fascist invasion. Several colleges, including New York University, Notre Dame, Ohio Wesleyan, Purdue, and Long Island University refused to compete. The U.S. branch of WILPF called for a boycott, and The Crisis editorialized, “Stay Out of the Olympics”:
The Crisis joins other publications in opposition to American athletes taking part…. Upon the grounds of poor sportsmanship and discrimination, America, of course, cannot raise a very sincere howl….
Segregation in the United States had resulted in discrimination against Negro athletes during the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games. “We should address ourselves to the color line in our own backyard,” The Crisis concluded, and withdraw the U.S. team from the Nazi Olympics.
[The German] government is founded officially upon suppression of religious, political and social liberty, and upon terror and brutality. We ought not contribute anything, either in money or prestige to such a government….
An “Olympic Committee on Fair Play in Sports,” led by Judge Jeremiah T. Mahoney, campaigned for nonparticipation. He and all boycotters were dismissed by Olympic officials as “extremists,” communists, and Jews. When on 15 July the U.S. team of over 385 athletes, the largest to date, left for Berlin, anti-Nazi protest was “conspicuous by its absence.”
The Nazi Olympics represented a gigantic propaganda victory, a feast of Nazi pageantry. Hitler officially suspended anti-Jewish activities during the games. Anti-Jewish posters and wall signs were removed; most anti-Jewish publications were suspended. Every German was called upon to participate in the propaganda effort to end “all prejudices against the German nation”: “We must be more charming than the Parisians, more easy-going than the Viennese, more vivacious than the Romans, more cosmopolitan than London, and more practical than New York.” Courses were given in the “fine art of hospitality,” and western visitors who arrived by train noticed “a quite astounding” display of eager service.
Not everybody was fooled by such camouflage. On 12 January 1936, The New York Times explained the context: “For the Olympics the War Against Jews Is to Be Waged with Less Publicity.” The “cold pogrom” now focused on a pay-as-you-leave plan to eliminate the Jewish population of Germany, which resulted in a movement to “buy exile.” The fiscal “project for a Jewish mass exodus” was supported by Germany’s finance minister, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht. If it helped Germany “get gold, foreign exchange or raw materials,” if European and
American Jews raised the capital and created an “International Liquidation Bank,” with headquarters in London, it served several purposes.
The Nazi Olympics cast a floodlight upon the complicated issues of race and racism in the United States and Germany. When Hitler failed to greet Negro athletes, magazine and newspaper articles concerning U.S. racial attitudes appeared. To avoid Nazi disfavor, U.S. Olympic coaches benched Jewish athletes, notably Sam Stoller and Martin Glickman.
Germany won the most medals, but black U.S. track star Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals, was the enduring hero of the games. The Crisis editorialized: There was “one good thing Little Hitler did for Negro Americans.” He demonstrated the “meaning of fascism, about which we have been hearing so much…. The masses have been indifferent. But Hitler has changed all that… Fascism is the last thing American Negroes want…. [It] is a system where a white man who runs third is better than a Negro who runs first, breaks a world record, and gets a gold medal. That is as bad as Mississippi….”
Hitler did not invent the biomythology of Anglo-Saxon superiority. His assertion “The Nordic race is entitled to dominate the world” was an echo, not an innovation. Throughout the United States, during the 1930s, major newspapers carried paid advertisements that announced: “No Jews or Catholics need apply!” Hitlerites understood the nature of race relations in the United States and were greatly encouraged. Nothing was done or said by public officials in the Anglo-American world to cause Hitler to think he did not have support for racialist outrages.
During the first three years of Hitler’s regime there were many opportunities for protest. But they passed in silence. As propaganda, no event had more approval overtones than participation in the 1936 Olympic Games orchestrated to celebrate Nazi virtue, Nazi solidarity, Nazi strength.
Eleanor Roosevelt Page 48
