With fascist violence on the rise, Fish opposed his Republican colleague who asked: “If we cannot legislate on the greatest mob crime of the age, sit-down strikes, how in the world can we constitutionally legislate on this?” Fish replied: Sit-down strikes “involved the invasion of private property,” not “the destruction of human lives…. I believe in placing human rights above property rights.”
ER regretted that her husband lost a chance to challenge his longtime enemy on this important subject, and she particularly hailed Caroline O’Day’s courageous political speech, given as a woman born and brought up in Georgia. Like ER, who in 1934 connected international and domestic race violence, O’Day declared that with Japan’s atrocities in China and Hitler’s repeated boast that he treated Jews in Germany better than Negroes were treated in the United States, worldwide floodlights were cast upon American lynchings.
O’Day had returned from a world tour, and everywhere she went she met people who believed that America was defined by a culture of bloodlust, sadism, and race hate. In her travels, she defended her country’s honor and declared that only isolated incidents occurred, but she now addressed Congress with passionate urgency:
This free country of ours, where our liberties are supposedly so fully guaranteed under the laws, is the only country in the world which tolerates lynching….
Enlightened Americans… are revolted at the thought of mob violence [and]… are now supporting the anti-lynching bill….
In a recent poll, “7 out of 10, or 70 percent, of our citizens were in favor of a Federal anti-lynching bill; and to the honor of the South… a full 65 percent” favored it.
Unless it became law, O’Day declared, we stand before the world condemned as an outlaw nation. In India, for example, “I saw in many places for sale a book called Uncle Sham. This book held up our country as calling itself civilized, and then throughout the pages of the book was pointed out every dreadful thing that ever happened…. The chapter on lynching was particularly horrible.” Not admitted into the United States, the book might be dismissed as communist propaganda; but it was written “by a Hindu… translated into 86 Hindu dialects and is one of the best sellers in India.” It was also translated into Japanese, and she had similar experiences in China, Siam, and “in a far-away jungle in French Indochina….” Even in South Africa, where race problems are “very much more acute… everywhere I went people… brought up this subject of lynching; and I assure you it is impossible to make people in other parts of the world believe that all of us here are not in favor of it….”
Caroline O’Day was proud to be among many Southerners who wanted an end to the rule of states’ rights, race discrimination, and lynching. The people of the world “cannot understand our philosophy of States’ rights, for they look upon us as a unified nation under one federal government.”
During the debate, a particularly grisly lynching witnessed by a mob of hundreds occurred in Mississippi. Two men were abducted as they were taken from the courtroom to jail in Winona; they were tortured with gasoline blowtorches and then burned on a pyre. Emmanuel Celler brought the outrage to the floor, noting a bitter irony: Governor Hugh White was giving an address in Jackson, proud that Mississippi “had not had a lynching in 15 months,” when he was informed of the cruel facts. It was the third lynching of 1937. There had been eighty-three lynchings since 1933.
Another Southerner rose to support O’Day, and in a resounding speech, John Marshall Robison of Kentucky, who had supported the Dyer antilynch bill in 1922, challenged FDR personally. A Republican, he pointed out that Southern and border Democrats would block this bill unless FDR put it on his “must” list. “The Democrats have more than 3-to-l majority in the House; and nearly 6-to-1 majority in the Senate;” 95 percent of Republicans supported the bill; Democrats opposed it. Robison argued that the bill could have been passed in the 73rd and 74th Congresses if FDR had spoken. There were sufficient “northern, western, and eastern Democrats… with the help of the Republicans… to put this… through, and even pass it over the president’s veto. If it is not put through we know the administration is… deceiving the colored people of this country….”
On 14 April 1937, the House passed the Gavagan-Wagner-Van Nuys bill, 277-120. ER promised Walter White every help in moving it through the Senate. As before, she personally appealed to FDR—who argued that his political capital was wrapped up in the Supreme Court fight. He refused to see White or Joel Spingarn and had no advice to offer the NAACR With a heavy heart, ER wrote White:
The President says that he is not familiar enough with the proper procedure to give you really good advice. I think you had better trust to the people in charge of the bill….
For months, ER appealed again and again to her husband for one public word. The legislation stalled in the Senate, and when it was brought up after the summer, it was confronted by a six-week filibuster. The South brought Congress to a standstill. Everything pending seemed doomed. Senator Wagner worried about his housing bill and his new wages and hours bill. Nothing would happen, ER and her allies believed, unless FDR spoke out. FDR disagreed with his wife’s assessment of the defiant South and refused to risk the future of his other issues on lynching. Finally, in October 1937, Senator Wagner withdrew the Wagner-Gavagan-Van Nuys bill.*
Besides the Court, FDR’s only legislative initiative during the dreary political months of the 75th Congress was to extend the Neutrality Act of 1935, which had been due to expire on 1 May 1937. The new law gave the administration more discretionary authority and allowed trade on a cash-and-carry basis. It extended embargoes to civil war situations, previously uncovered, which specifically legitimated FDR’s embargo on Spain.
FDR left for a cruise on 27 April, to fish in the Gulf of Mexico for two weeks. He signed the Neutrality Act of 1937 aboard ship at 6:30 A.M. on 1 May. But it satisfied nobody, least of all his wife. ER considered it a hateful piece of legislation that made no distinction between aggressor and victim nations, and actually favored well-armed aggressors ready to attack. It also favored maritime nations, notably England, France, and Japan. In cash-poor Germany, the press condemned the cash-and-carry feature as “an Anglo-American alliance.” Nevertheless, U.S. copper and steel companies continued to give Germany loans, since there was no embargo against Germany.
It appeased businessmen who resented limitations on export trade and ignored pacifist groups who wanted a full embargo of raw materials, especially those needed in war: petroleum, steel, copper, magnesium, phosphates, cotton. The new act placed an embargo on arms, ammunition, and travel, but specifically excluded raw materials.
ER was not alone in her bitter dismay over the embargo against Spain. It was a compromise neutrality that limited risks and preserved profits. It was a cold war neutrality that acknowledged Hitler and Mussolini as acceptable barriers to anarchists, communists, radical democrats.
Howls of protest from both isolationists and internationalists emerged. World Court supporters, notably Henry Stimson (Hoover’s secretary of state), deplored the abandonment of America’s “self-respecting traditions, in order to avoid the hostility of reckless violators of international law.”
Allen Dulles and Hamilton Fish Armstrong condemned the embargo as a reversal of America’s traditional position on freedom of the seas and all Wilsonian principles and said it would serve as a terrible “instrument in the hands of the German and Italian totalitarian governments.” Isolationist senator Gerald P. Nye agreed and condemned it as a terrible injustice.
Liberals then called for the embargo to cover Germany and Italy, since they were the aggressor parties to the “Civil War.” But FDR refused to distinguish between aggressor and victim nations: That would not be “neutral.”*
For ER, the Spanish Civil War was the moral equator. Furious over her husband’s policy, which enabled trade to soar with Germany and Italy, trade which was then used to devastate Spain, she wrote of it regularly in her May columns.
On 26 April 1937, Guernica, a
town of seven thousand people in the Basque province of Vizcaya, close to the sea and thirty kilometers from Bilbao, was the first open city to be bombed from the air, without warning or pity. On Monday, market day in Guernica, at 4:40 P.M., the central square, filled with farmers, florists, craftsfolk, and shoppers, was razed by Nazi Heinkel 111s. As the people ran for shelter and safety they were machine-gunned by diving planes. Incendiary bombs and high explosives were dropped every twenty minutes for four hours. The raid killed 1,654 and wounded 889.
Guernica was a Roman Catholic citadel, and Basque priests under the vicar-general of Bilbao, center of Basque nationalism, had voted to remain loyal to the democratic Spanish Republic, in defiance of the Catholic hierarchy. This bombardment was their punishment. It heralded the century’s new wartime strategy of carpet bombing against civilian populations. Guernica also heralded a new psychological warfare technique of cover-up and denial. News of Guernica did not become public until 7 May 1937, when Britain’s foreign minister, Anthony Eden, announced that Britain “had evidence Guernica was destroyed by airplanes” and called for a neutral inquiry. That same day, The New York Times headlined that five thousand women and children had been taken from Bilbao to France for safety, guarded by British warships, and many other refugees were preparing to leave.
Franco claimed the Basques had destroyed their own town, and Germany denied all involvement.*
ER was haunted by Guernica: Every time she saw a newspaper photograph or read a new story about Spain, she was overcome with a “sense of horror.” She called for relief measures, hoped that people would contribute to the English Quakers who rushed to aid the suffering children of Spain, and wondered “why people go on stupidly destroying” civilization.
One day, on a train up the Hudson, she could not work, could not knit, could do nothing but contemplate Spain. As she gazed at the rolling river she loved so well, she wondered: “If this were Spain would I be sitting so calmly and with such security…?” Today, there were “no shells dropping on our cities and villages; no children in great number are being separated from their parents….”
She hoped America’s commitment to democracy would survive:
If reforms do not come peacefully, they have to come through violent upheavals. As I looked out from the window of the train, I thought, “Thank God, this nation has had the courage to face the need of change before we reached the point where bloodshed was the only way to achieve a change….
Spain and refugee issues would dominate the rest of ER’s political life.
The day FDR left for his fishing vacation, ER left for a West Coast speaking tour that began in Seattle for a week with Anna and her grandchildren. Tommy wrote Anna that ER was “like a child starting out on her first outing….”
On 5 May, ER and Anna launched her new broadcast series sponsored by Ponds Vanishing Cream. They discussed the education of a daughter for the twentieth century.
Anna asked her mother to explain her educational philosophy for her only daughter. ER replied she wanted to end the restrictions she had grown up with, the notion that all women were to be “wives, mothers and adornments to society,” and wanted to encourage “any aptitudes you showed.”
Always disturbed by Anna’s disinterest in school, which had represented her own liberation, ER asked her daughter to describe the “useful” aspects of her education. Anna replied: “It was the development of my bump of curiosity,” encouraged by being with “you and father,” which made up for her attitude in school. She revealed to her mother that she also “hated to play the piano,” and hid “in the kitchen closet” when her music teacher arrived. Surprised, ER asked why Anna insisted that her daughter play the piano: “You’d better explain that a little….”
They both agreed that access to books and uncensored reading were the best part of education. As a child, ER had run off into the woods of Tivoli with forbidden books, and she now believed in the absolute freedom to read and to know. She was certain that reading adult books never hurt children: If a child happened on an unsuitable book for her age, she probably “would not understand it, but it would do no harm.”
Both ER and Anna discussed their emotional fears as girls, and ER acknowledged that she had battled “an inferiority complex” for years. Anna did as well, and blamed her mother: “I think that was your fault…. I never felt I could be as capable and interesting as you and father were….”
ER: “If only our companionship could have developed as freely when you were little as it did later on, I would have probably understood a great deal more. You are doing a better job….”
Anna: “That’s nice of you, Mother. But how do I know how she’ll feel about it when she grows up?”
ER: “Perhaps she’ll feel as we do now. I don’t think of you only as a daughter, but as my best friend.”
ER asked Anna what she most wanted for her daughter, and Anna replied that she wanted freedom “from any sense of superiority or inferiority to any group of people, and… a sense of values that will help her to be tolerant, useful, and happy.”
ER noted: “That’s the 20th Century answer and I like it, and I think the girl will be well educated to live in our world. I think if my grandmother had been asked what she wanted for her daughter she might have answered simply: ‘a good husband!’”
While ER was in Seattle, she worked on the revisions for her last installments of her memoir for the Ladies’ Home Journal. Her publishers were displeased; they wanted ER to deal with the real issues of her early married days and FDR’s polio. Hick suspected that “by this time you have come to the period where you can no longer be wholly truthful. And it shows in the story. That’s the trouble with autobiographies. Probably they should always be done anonymously.”
ER sought, above all, to protect everybody she loved. Her manuscript was read by FDR, Tommy, Earl, Hick, and Anna, among others. Blue lines abounded, and some of them were surprising. FDR deleted a passage in which ER quoted Isabella Greenway’s mother about Hall’s first divorce: “If you love a person, you can forgive the big things. Infidelity under certain circumstances need not ruin a relationship.”
Although convinced of the wisdom of that insight, ER agreed to take it out. But as she wrote, and rewrote, the days of her life during the tense spring of 1937, that observation concerning Franklin had a special meaning. Never had their political disagreements been so profound. Never had she had so much access to public forums. Her lectures were sold out; her broadcast series was hugely popular; her book was an immediate best-seller. But she could not persuade her husband to consider her views, reconsider his path. With little influence at home, she stayed far away. While FDR concentrated on the Supreme Court fight, all legislative initiatives were forestalled, and ER felt the 1936 electoral mandate was wasted.
The New York Times called ER “the most traveled First Lady in history.” Away from the White House 60 percent of the time since 1933, she pointed out that she was there most of the time FDR was in residence.
ER’s travels cheered her, and the success of her book encouraged her to do even more. Tommy wrote Anna that the “circulation of the Ladies’ Home Journal has gone over three million per month, so they should be satisfied. George Bye says he will die regretting that he didn’t hold out for twice what he got.”*
Awash in controversy over the antilynch law and Spain, both celebrated and mocked by the partisan press, ER was happy to spend a quiet moment of affectionate domesticity with Earl. She had been intimately involved in all aspects of Earl’s life, and her relationship with him was now a comforting blend of mother-and-son generosity, lady-and-squire protectiveness. On 8 May, ER wrote Hick from Earl’s, who “has more things to do here than anyone I ever knew. I made curtains all morning but this afternoon we played ping pong and tonight we have to write scenes for the party tomorrow.”
ER had fun at Earl’s, was carefree and at ease with his show-business friends—and some, like Tiny, increasingly became her companions of choice.
&nb
sp; FDR returned from his cruise in mid-May rested and restored. ER noted that “Franklin seems confident about everything!” Almost immediately after his return, ER flew to New York for “an orgy of theatre going.”
ER loved the theater and attended openings whenever possible, usually escorted by Earl. Producer John Golden never refused ER’s request for tickets for her theater parties, and he frequently presented lavish gifts to ER personally and to the White House, including a most extraordinary gold-leafed piano.
Nevertheless, ER chided her friend’s male bias in a column:
I noticed a little item in the paper the other day, and much as I like Mr. John Golden, I am going to differ with him. He says: “A writer of great plays must have lived, gone through most of the valleys, and over most of the hills of experience. Men can do that but women cannot…. There will never be any really great women writers in the theater, because women do not know as much as men.”
ER dismissed that as “ludicrous.” She considered it “funny” to think there would never be great women writers for the theater. They lacked only opportunity: “Because as a rule women know not only what men know, but much that men will never know. For how many men really know the heart and soul of a woman?”
Evidently stung by ER’s column, Golden produced Susan and God, by playwright Rachel Crothers. Directed by Crothers and starring Gertrude Lawrence, it opened at New York’s Plymouth Theatre on 7 October, and Golden invited ER to attend. She wrote:
Many thanks for the flowers. Your note afforded me a great deal of amusement and you are magnanimous in producing a play by a woman which she “wrote alone.” Susan and God certainly gives one an interesting evening. I felt a little let down by the last curtain but enjoyed all the rest more than I can say.*
Eleanor Roosevelt Page 64
