Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  On 20 January, news came of King George’s death, which caused ER to reflect: “No, one can’t be sorry for people who are dead unless one believes in a hell after death which I do not, but it is bad for those who live on here and don’t know what the future holds beyond the barrier.”

  On 24 January ER’s cousin Corinne Alsop arrived to stay at the White House, although she was in Washington to participate in the anti-FDR Liberty League festivities, which were to feature New York’s former governor Al Smith. Unprepared for the profound change in the once liberal Democrat whose presidential campaign she ran in 1928, ER had even invited Al Smith to stay at the White House.

  One of ER’s contributions to FDR’s 1936 campaign was her lecture tour, “Ways of Peace,” which reinforced in part the administration’s strict neutrality policy. The new weaponry already used against Ethiopia by Italy and against China by Japan escalated war’s devastation. Everywhere she spoke, she emphasized one theme: Military defenses “would be of comparatively little value in the next war,” which would be an air war against civilians and destructive beyond imagining. “I think we had better begin to decide whether we wish to preserve our civilization or whether we think, it of so little use that we might as well let it go. That is what war amounts to.”

  ER wanted to keep the United States “out of war,” and remained convinced that only collective security, united action, would prevent war. If war erupted, it would swamp every nation. ER disagreed with peace advocates who counseled unilateral disarmament. She wrote Jeannette Rankin, pacifist and former member of Congress, that “armaments caused distrust between nations, but that disarmament must be international so that no one country leaves itself open to attack or invasion.”

  On 1 February, she addressed the American Youth Congress and criticized its commitment to absolute pacifism. While she agreed that military training in schools “should never be compulsory,” it should be offered for “those students who desire it.” Above all, she criticized supporters of Youth Against War and Fascism who endorsed “anti-war strikes,” and the Oxford pledge, which affirmed that under “no circumstances” would this generation fight in any future war.

  On 9 February 1933, students in the Oxford Union initiated the pledge, as a protest against empire, militarism, and conservative rule. By 1936, radical students throughout the United States took it. But ER feared for the future, and understood the pacifist’s dilemma: Peace required collective security, which meant resistance against aggression. To defend a small nation attacked by a militarized power required preparedness and confrontation, an economic blockade at least. Nations must be willing to cut off oil, copper, steel, basic trade with the aggressor. Unilateral disarmament in a militarized world with Hitler and Mussolini at the helm seemed to her madness, as insane as war itself. She told her student audience that they had not “thought through all its implications.” ER lamented both her husband’s official non-involvement which led to the sacrifice of Ethiopia, and the students’ absolute pacifism.

  As ER contemplated the demands of the presidential campaign and the daunting international situation, she began to draw on new friends and allies. She asked Fannie Hurst to keynote the Women’s Press Party: “I do like her.” Mount Holyoke’s president, Dr. Mary Woolley, the only woman delegate to the Geneva Disarmament Conference, arrived for tea and evidently stayed for dinner with Anna Louise Strong. It was a scintillating evening.

  Lillian Wald initially asked ER to meet with Anna Louise Strong in 1935: “You may remember her as the girl who went to Russia thirteen years ago and who … has been back numerous times to lecture and to try to have us see Russia as she sees it.” Wald wrote ER that Strong’s “numerous books have been well received” and “she knows Russia now better than anybody else.”

  Best known as the woman who launched the Seattle general strike of 1919, Strong first went to Russia for the Quakers; she worked there mostly as a journalist, and taught Trotsky English. Her controversial autobiography, I Change Worlds, was published in 1935, and now, Wald wrote ER, she planned to return with a mission:

  It is whispered … that the rich Jews in Europe and America are negotiating for 10,000 German émigrés to go to Buro Bidgin [as a safe haven for Jews]. Anyway Anna Louise Strong is going to visit the place in Siberia.

  If it means anything at all to you let me know. … She is an attractive creature and fair. …

  ER replied immediately:

  I would love to see Anna Louise Strong. Do you think she would care to come to lunch with me …? If so, I will try to get Franklin here or arrange for her to have a chat with him afterwards. Thank you so much for thinking of it.

  ER was eager for more information about Russia since Maxim Litvinov was the only foreign minister who consistently called for collective security against fascism, and ER distrusted U.S. ambassador Bill Bullitt. But it was bold indeed for the First Lady to invite the first lady of U.S. radicalism to the White House.

  A persuasive, action-oriented woman, Anna Louise Strong impressed those who met her as formidable, the kind of woman who “commanded everyone to drop what [he or she was] doing and concentrate on what Anna Louise was doing.” Ella Winter, married to Strong’s mentor Lincoln Steffens, described Strong as “a huge woman with cropped gray hair, china-blue eyes, and a manner so impersonal that I wondered if she would go on talking if one went out of the room.”

  ER was not bothered by her manner; they shared an ethic, but differed about how to achieve it. Strong championed socialism, then communism. ER believed capitalism could be transformed into something humane that included economic democracy as well as political justice. They were fascinated by each other, and a cordial friendship and lasting correspondence developed between the First Lady and one of America’s most notorious heretics.

  After their February 1936 dinner, ER wrote Hick: “Anna Louise Strong evidently thinks we are beaten.” But Strong wrote ER:

  I am glad for your sake that you are much more optimistic than I am…. To a person as sincere as you I felt that I owed the most sincere and thoughtful analysis I could make.

  But wisdom did not begin and will not end with me, and you have thousands of wise people helping you as well as millions who trust your leadership. So perhaps you may succeed either in repairing the capitalist system to fit human needs or in making a more or less painless transition to some system that will. If anyone can, I think you can.

  In any case, if there is ever any time when anything I know can be of use to you, please call on me. This applies not only to your term or terms in the White House, but to … whatever future awaits us.

  Preoccupied by publishing deadlines and the demands of the campaign, ER impulsively sent Hick a telegram asking her, “if free,” to meet her train at Grand Central on 17 February. But Tommy accompanied her to the city. When Hick saw them descend the train steps, she stormed away. ER wrote the next morning:

  Hick darling. I am so very, very sorry. I ought to know it must be alone or not at all and you probably felt I brought you down under false pretenses but I didn’t mean to even though I did. You were sweet to telephone this morning and I am grateful.

  For ER the trip-up and back to Washington was not wasted: “Tommy and I worked all the way down on the train.”

  Upset by opposition to her efforts to protect immigrants and refugees, Frances Perkins met with ER “to talk over her troubles on the Jewish question.” For over a year, Perkins sought to find a way to “relieve the strain on terrorized people” by removing some of the restrictions against immigration. Herbert Hoover’s Depression-era executive order against economically dependent immigrants without American relatives to vouch for them was still rigidly interpreted so as to prevent even the allowable immigration quotas from being filled. Perkins wanted FDR to issue a new executive order. But he refused, and anti-immigration contempt swelled in Congress.

  Over half Germany’s Jews were already in exile by 1936. While most had fled to neighboring countries, those with friends or r
elatives in the United States sought sanctuary with them. A growing population of immigrants on tourist visas and immigrants with no papers at all created a grievous situation of harassment and deportation. Concerned about rising anti-alien sentiment, ER and Perkins were allied with Caroline O’Day, who wanted to introduce legislation to prevent the deportation of illegal aliens—many of whom had been in the country for years, were employed, and had young children born here. ER believed that a more liberal Labor Department interpretation might facilitate their becoming citizens.

  Perkins assured her that was impossible. Nobody “who is in this country illegally can become a citizen, under existing statutes.” Deportation remained a possibility—even “for persons of good character,” although there were individual Jewish cases over which Perkins had jurisdiction that she tried to resolve happily, with visa extensions; others were denied.

  Charles Milgram, for example, appealed to ER for an extension of a “temporary visitors stay for two worthy Rabbis,” Salamon Horowitz and Szmul Elia Epstein. They were well known and highly respected. ER wrote: “Send at once to Frances Perkins and ask if it can be done.” Their visit was extended, for six months. Perkins was embattled over each case, and confronted a mostly hostile Congress and State Department. Although ER responded to each letter sent her by needful refugees and forwarded most of them to Perkins, unless FDR issued a new executive order there was no hope for a policy change.

  At the end of March, the Women’s Democratic Committee veterans, ER’s core team, arrived in Washington to spend several days with her to strategize the 1936 campaign. Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, Molly Dewson, and Agnes Brown Leach, along with Caroline O’Day, met regularly, and were particularly annoyed that the men seemed so confident while their enemies got off to a vigorous start.

  Only several days after Al Smith damned FDR at the Liberty League banquet in January, 3,500 Southern Democrats met in Macon, Georgia, to denounce the New Deal and repudiate FDR. Led by Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge and funded largely by Liberty Leaguers, Dixiecrats blasted “Russocrats” and made dire warnings about Negro influence and the loss of states’ rights.

  At the Macon meeting, ER was the primary target: She had encouraged Southern Negroes “to embrace” collectivism; and was determined to destroy white supremacy. The Georgia Woman’s World magazine with photographs of ER receiving flowers from a black child in Detroit, and the First Lady escorted by two black youths in uniform, Howard University students, was on every seat. Thomas Dixon, author of The Klansman, filmed as “The Birth of a Nation,” received the loudest cheers when he called the NAACP the “worst communist organization” in America.

  The NAACP defended the New Deal. The Crisis editorialized that ER and FDR were attacked for “forcing social equality on the South” because they “received a handful of Negroes at the White House with ordinary courtesy” and because FDR appointed several Negroes “to richly deserved positions. They forget that Blacks of northern and western states voted for FDR….”

  The creation of a Southern opposition party with Talmadge as its nominee must have jolted FDR, who had compromised so much in order to maintain Democratic unity. Walter White, for example, wrote ER an indignant letter during the 1934 campaign when FDR agreed to end the national work relief minimum wage after his meeting with Talmadge: “I most certainly do feel [abolishing the minimum wage] was aimed at the Negro. It is significant that this ruling came immediately after Governor Talmadge of Georgia had visited the President at Warm Springs….” For Talmadge, every New Deal program that failed to discriminate was odious. White was stunned that the administration would do anything “to conciliate him,” since it was known that Talmadge planned “one of the dirtiest anti-Negro campaigns that has been promoted in recent years in the South.”

  Now, Talmadge initiated a campaign dedicated to FDR’s defeat. All the President’s prior efforts to conciliate the diehard South seemed wasted, and bitter.

  ER was never sanguine about elections. Tricks and traps might derail any “sure” victory. She was disturbed that the Democratic campaign was slow to start. The racist South was in the enemy’s camp, the working South doubtful, and she was troubled that Alf Landon, a progressive Republican, courted the traditional black vote. He tried to distance himself from the Liberty League and the Macon Democrats, who were nevertheless in his camp. ER wanted this fully understood, and was impatient for the campaign to begin.

  Moreover, Democratic women were irate: They needed to be reconciled, their enthusiasm reignited. For months, as Molly Dewson prepared work for the women’s committee, she complained to ER about the haphazard men’s team, headed by FDR:

  I was disappointed that Franklin could not see me but not surprised because I marvel night and day at what he does. Yet sometimes to be perfectly frank with you I wonder whether some of the persons the papers say he sees are more important to see than I am….

  Dewson was particularly disappointed that her effort to get her rainbow flyers filled with New Deal information into every neighborhood was slighted. Like ER, Dewson wanted no votes taken for granted. Their literature was first-rate and their speakers were ready; but spring conferences were not yet planned, and they lacked “some human wonder like the President to go into the states and make the women forget their disappointment over patronage, to draw out the stored up venom.” An “emotional orator” was needed to go around the country and ready “women leaders” for the battle. Apathy reigned; there were “rotten situations” in several states; Dewson felt “powerless,” and signed her letter “Your gloomy Gus, Molly.”

  By April, ER was puzzled and miffed that the men continued to do virtually nothing and had not even begun their campaign. On 18 April 1936, she wrote Jim Farley: She wanted at least “one really good woman’s speech” made at the convention in June. ER was eager to go over details with Farley and sent personnel and patronage suggestions:

  “Senator and Mrs. Costigan are very hard up.” Despondent over the failure of his antilynch bill, the senator was ailing and ER wanted Mrs. Costigan to “have a job on some commission….

  “Don’t forget that Molly wants a job either on the Social Security Board or as an assistant secretary doing [something] she is fitted for.

  “I forgot to say that Phoebe Omlie should be given consideration. Is there any chance of moving [Eugene] Vidal? If so she might be assistant secretary in charge of aviation and considering all the fighting she might be rather acceptable to all concerned….”*

  Farley assured ER that he would discuss all her suggestions “and be governed by your wishes on anything I do relative to the activity of the women.”

  When John Studebaker invited ER to select any topic for a Washington Town Hall Forum, which he chaired, she quickly suggested women and work, and named her panel: Fannie Hurst, George Creel, Josephine Roche. For ninety minutes on Sunday, 2 February, ER spoke candidly to an overflow audience of fifteen hundred:

  There is something inherently good for every human being in work. Only through work can a woman fulfill her obligation to herself and to the world and justify her existence….

  It is the right of any woman who wants to work to do so.

  Her speech lasted forty minutes; then, “skillfully and good-naturedly,” she responded to a challenging, though largely agreeable, panel and audience:

  Isn’t it a fact that women have always worked, often very hard; did anybody make a fuss about it until they began to be paid for their work?

  Since widows and spinsters are now regarded as America’s greatest menace, should not they be allowed to fight our future wars? In such case, of course, men should not insist upon the sole right to declare war….

  ER received countless letters of protest on this issue, which she patiently answered: “I am afraid that your attitude towards women is completely foreign to my more modern ideas….”

  Issues of women and work remained high on ER’s agenda. In meetings with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and other organizat
ions of business and professional women, ER championed equal protection laws for women and men, eight-hour days for women and men, and equal pay for equal work.

  Working women made many contributions, and ER used every opportunity to celebrate them. She introduced Mary Breckenridge at a White House reception for women, on 6 February: Breckenridge directed the “Frontier Nursing Service in Kentucky, which is carried on by nurses on horseback [who presided over] small clinics dotted here and there in the mountains.”

  On 18 March, ER broadcast with Charl Ormond Williams for the ninth annual celebration of “National Business Women’s Week” as “the first business and professional woman to be mistress” of the White House. There were sixty thousand members of the Federation of Business and Professional Women, and eleven million working women in the United States. ER called upon that vast constituency to promote the idea of an important new agency the nation needed: a federal department of “education, the arts, social welfare, and health.” Charl Williams reminded the broadcast audience that ER had called for such a department, and federal aid to education, as early as 1924—when she chaired the Democratic Party’s first women’s platform committee. their enthusiasm reignited. For months, as Molly Dewson prepared work for the women’s committee, she complained to ER about the haphazard men’s team, headed by FDR:

  I was disappointed that Franklin could not see me but not surprised because I marvel night and day at what he does. Yet sometimes to be perfectly frank with you I wonder whether some of the persons the papers say he sees are more important to see than I am….

  Dewson was particularly disappointed that her effort to get her rainbow flyers filled with New Deal information into every neighborhood was slighted. Like ER, Dewson wanted no votes taken for granted. Their literature was first-rate and their speakers were ready; but spring conferences were not yet planned, and they lacked “some human wonder like the President to go into the states and make the women forget their disappointment over patronage, to draw out the stored up venom.” An “emotional orator” was needed to go around the country and ready “women leaders” for the battle. Apathy reigned; there were “rotten situations” in several states; Dewson felt “powerless,” and signed her letter “Your gloomy Gus, Molly.”