Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  25: This Troubled World, 1938

  This Troubled World was officially published on 3 January 1938 to good notices and brisk sales. Reviewed generously in the Sunday New York Times on 2 January, it was hailed as a valuable, tough-minded assessment of the world’s grave problems. “Without sentimentality or undue optimism,” ER discussed alternatives to disaster and concluded with a fervent appeal for a fundamental transformation “in human nature.” A contribution to international understanding, this slim book’s strength was “in its poise… its quiet forceful courage.”

  Within a month, Tommy wrote Anna, the “little book on peace has been very successful.” It earned the book’s advance “and a small amount besides.” This Is My Story continued to do well, and “the year closed with 20,000 copies sold. The fan mail on both books has been very encouraging, and so has the press.”

  Suddenly it had become acceptable—even laudable—to be America’s most ardent public citizen, and First Lady. ER had been elected the “outstanding woman of 1937” by a vast majority in “the mail poll” conducted by a popular NBC announcer, Howard Claney. She now inspired editorials of praise for all her work and her controversial positions.

  In Ohio, The Canton Repository called her “the foremost individualist among all the First Ladies” and honored her because “she has lived her own life with a freedom that smashed precedent, traveling widely as she willed, speaking her own mind on every occasion and engaging in activities so diversified they are a little staggering.”

  A reporter for The Denver Democrat attended one of her lectures on youth and recommended it to “every boy and girl in our land.” The apex of ER’s lecture, he wrote, was her definition of success—which was a description of herself: to cultivate and express “one’s talents and powers to the utmost,” and to use “those powers for the welfare of the community.” Then she spoke “of the hope of youth for peace and of America’s mission to help bring peace to the world and at that the vast audience rose in tumultuous applause as a personal tribute to a great woman….”

  ER never referred to her public achievements, although she wrote her daughter about a personal achievement: “I’m getting really good on make up. You won’t know me!”

  Domestic life was untidy and strained as the New Year unfolded. Earl had been ill at her New York apartment for days, and ER was “really worried about him.” “Hick has been ill with a very bad throat.” Tommy has been “miserable ever since Christmas.” “Missy also has been miserable.” “Pa seems fine however!”—although he was still preoccupied with Betsey, and everybody was worried about Harry Hopkins. James told ER that Harry “sits & looks at his wife’s picture for hours & can’t be roused, & then is too gay. I’m sorry for little Diana.” ER wrote her daughter, “I am the only healthy person I think in these parts!”

  With her household laid low, ER was pleased to spend more time with her brother at 11th Street. He was just then in good spirits and, Tommy wrote, had become a dependable ally: “Hall has been particularly sweet to [your mother], always meets her when he knows she is coming to New York, etc., and I know that gives her a lot of pleasure.”

  Relations with Hick plunged to a new level of distress. At work Hick felt attacked by gossip and lies, fantasies and innuendos. The situation ate into her heart, and she felt powerless. She confessed to ER that it had been going on ever since she walked into the World’s Fair headquarters, on 4 January 1937. Hick struggled to protect ER from the rumors, but they were the source of her anguish, and she could not keep it inside any longer: ER had gotten her the job, and she was miserable; actually angry. If only ER had encouraged her to resume her career. ER was fifty-three, in control of her life and destiny; Hick was forty-four, locked into the prison of a job she hated, when she could be in Madrid or Berlin or Moscow. ER had tried to control Hick, order her life, restore her health, protect her bank accounts. It was all a vast mistake, and she was very sorry.

  Then Hick regretted the intensity of her outburst:

  I’m sorry I talked to you with such bitterness…. It wasn’t fair, but—since I did say it—it’s true. I’ve felt this way for nearly a year…. I’ll try not to talk about it any more. You shouldn’t be such a good listener.

  Their anguished correspondence went on for a month. Initially ER tried to minimize the source of Hick’s grief: “I doubt if the whisperings and side-long glances are all that you imagine but when one is sensitive one suffers doubly.” Then she wrote: “Dearest, I hate all this you are going through and I know in some way it is connected with us.” ER hoped Hick might find “another job soon and that it is so remote from our influence that you will be relieved from that blight!”

  But Hick was not pleased by ER’s response. ER replied to a lost letter:

  It seems so hard that life should be so little worth living to you when so many people love and depend on you but I have felt as you do and I keep hoping that someday things will change for you and seem more worthwhile.

  While ER tried to soothe Hick, her own spirits were frayed: “I don’t like the [social] ‘season’ nor the White House.” But FDR’s 7 January speech “was very good.” The president reasserted leadership and seemed out of the doldrums. He opposed “predatory” monopolies and promised continued reforms. Ickes noticed that FDR’s Democratic enemies did not applaud; they sat grim-faced throughout: The “war is on fiercer than ever between the reactionaries and the liberals” within the party.

  On 16 January, ER wrote of Mrs. Baruch’s death, “which must have been very sudden for I did not know she was ill. It was a curious relationship and yet he had affection for her and was always thoughtful so I imagine he will miss her.” Although they traveled separately, Bernard Baruch was devoted to Annie Griffen Baruch, a mysterious figure John Golden remembered as a “laughing vibrant” former showgirl, and others found austere and reclusive. Her death was sudden, and Baruch was bereft. He told a friend no one could take her place: “My wife was the most wonderful woman in the world.” But she was uninterested in public affairs, and Baruch turned his attention to women most involved with them—including and increasingly ER.

  In mid-January, Hick’s depression lifted after good conversations with Commander Flanagan about her excellent work, and her correspondence with ER became more expansive. When Hick finished reading This Is My Story, she wrote:

  I think it is probably a much better book than even I realized while you were writing it. I am so proud of you! And I think the last chapter, over which you had such a struggle last summer is the best chapter in the book. Somehow it brings back and very near the you that I love. A very big person. And yet—what a hellish state of mind you were in when you were writing that chapter, last summer!

  In the same letter, she was contrite about her outbursts:

  I was hurt—yes. But you have also done a thousand things to make life easier and happier for me. And I’m deeply grateful. So don’t, please, feel—as you seem to feel sometimes—that you have failed in your relationship with me…. As I look back over these last five years—I don’t think anyone ever tried harder to make another human being happy and contented than you have tried with me….

  ER replied with a determined finality that left little room for renewed fantasies:

  Your Tuesday night letter was a great pleasure and I’m glad you like This Is My Story—Of course dear, I never meant to hurt you in any way but that is no excuse for having done it. It won’t help you any but I’ll never do to anyone else what I did to you. I’m pulling myself back in all my contacts now. I’ve always done it with the children and why I didn’t know I couldn’t give you (or anyone else who wanted and needed what you did) any real food I can’t now understand. Such cruelty and stupidity is unpardonable when you reach my age. Heaven knows I hope in some small and unimportant ways I have made life a little easier for you but that doesn’t compensate….

  As their stormy month ended, ER devoted a column to emotional endurance. Someone had sent her a book of poetry by Patience
Strong, Quiet Corner, which had encouraged her:

  Do not heed the world, its taunts and jeers—

  Lift your eyes and face the coming years—

  All great things are bought with human tears—

  So dream again.

  ER concluded: “Eternal optimism makes it possible to dream,” and “how thankful we can be that this power was given to us poor humans.”

  Energized by her honesty with Hick, ER planned FDR’s fifty-sixth birthday festivities with gusto: Unlike the year before, when she could think of nothing interesting to do without Howe, ER now orchestrated a gala event, with costumes and reminders of “some special incident” in their lives. FDR was “to guess” the incident, “and we will all keep score.” It was “a good dinner for Franklin… very jolly.” Then ER made the rounds of all seven benefit dances in FDR’s honor, and they were “very peppy this year.”

  She also planned more adventurous evenings with Hick at the opera and theater. Lohengrin was, ER wrote, “a real joy,” and they attended WPA’s One Third of a Nation, on Ash Wednesday. ER supposed “I can get away with it on Ash Wednesday if I don’t write about it!” Hick wondered, “[D]oes one wear evening clothes on Ash Wednesday to the WPA theatre?”

  These evenings were only partially successful, since Hick was still “bored with living.” She wrote, however, that “you were dear, and I did enjoy it. The play was quite swell, wasn’t it?” ER replied: “I know you are not feeling up to much but you were sweet. I love you.”

  Throughout January and February, ER studied the international news with dread. Daily the headlines were dire. Fueled by betrayal and violence, the storms of 1938 howled through Europe’s statehouses like an evil nightmare with smoldering fumes. ER took solace in her work with the women’s peace movement. She hosted 450 Cause and Cure of War ladies at tea and met with Elizabeth Read and Esther Lape before she spoke at the “‘Cause & Cure’ conference,” where Carrie Chapman Catt and Ruth Bryan Rohde “both made good speeches….” ER sought to give publicity and legitimacy to the activist women of the peace movement.

  At the last cabinet meeting of 1937, FDR had announced that “Romania had gone Fascist and Yugoslavia was on its way.”* Romania followed Hitler’s pattern and outlawed the Jews. Ickes wrote:

  There has always been a heavy proportion of Jews in Romania…. Apparently they are having a [dreadful] time… and it is reported that the rich Jews are already leaving…. Unfortunately the frontiers of many countries are now closed to Jews.

  Then, at the first cabinet meeting in January 1938, FDR suggested “some representation or protest” to Romania “about its treatment of the Jews.” But nothing was done.

  Also at that first January cabinet meeting Vice President Garner reported that he had heard Joseph Goebbels announce that Germany “intended to pay no attention to treaties.” He wondered what purpose negotiations or agreements now served. These were the dreadful conditions ER addressed in This Troubled World. She wrote it six months before, with the hope it might prompt her husband to end trade with aggressor nations. She demanded aggressor nations be named, and be confronted by collective action by the remaining democratic nations. Finally, FDR seemed to heed her advice, and he made a bold gesture toward collective security which she had urged for so long.

  On 11 January 1938, Sumner Welles approached Sir Ronald Lindsay in Washington with a “secret and confidential message” from FDR to Chamberlain. The president proposed a Washington conference of world leaders to discuss “the deterioration of the international situation” and its “Underlying causes.”

  If England agreed, FDR would approach France, Italy, and Germany. Lindsay considered the plan “a genuine effort to relax” tensions. Churchill considered it a splendid gesture, “formidable and measureless.” But their ally Foreign Minister Anthony Eden was on holiday, and Chamberlain rejected the proposal. He preferred to recognize Italy’s occupation of Abyssinia, and he cared nothing about U.S. influence.

  FDR’s effort was too late. Tom Lamont, who knew Chamberlain well, told Bullitt that if “any Englishman was anti-American, Chamberlain was that anti-American Englishman.” Chamberlain considered Roosevelt a shifty scoundrel; and he trusted Hitler, a gentleman. Winston Churchill, however, recognized FDR’s effort as the last hope: Its rejection ended the era of negotiation. Had FDR’s intent become public, he risked isolationist outrage. His political courage to involve the United States in Europe’s “darkening scene” endeared him to Churchill:

  To Britain it was a matter almost of life and death. No one can measure in retrospect its effect upon the course of events…. We must regard its rejection… as the loss of the last frail chance to save the world from tyranny otherwise than by war.

  That Chamberlain, dull and inexperienced, dismissed “the proffered hand stretched out across the Atlantic” left Churchill “breathless with amazement.”

  Repelled by Chamberlain’s action in his absence, Eden resigned. He too believed FDR’s gesture represented the last possible collective effort to prevent Armageddon. His resignation, on 20 February 1938, was momentous. Britain was now entirely dominated by appeasers.

  Churchill despaired. It was the worst day of his career. In his long life of success and failure, he never felt so alone and overcome. On that night solely, 20 February 1938, he tossed sleepless in his bed “consumed by emotions of sorrow and fear.” Before his eyes marched the most painful visions, a long parade of death.

  Hitler now had a free hand. Austrian by birth, Hitler had a vision of Germany as the mythical mystical lands of Siegfried and Thor. Every land upon which Germans ever lived was part of Greater Germany. Not just the territory lost at Versailles, such as the Rhineland, but all of it: the entire heart of Europe from the borders of the Holy Roman Empire through the Kingdom of Prussia (from Danzig to Königsberg; beyond the Polish Corridor from the Oder to the Vistula), and all the lands southward within the Hapsburg Empire, beginning with Austria, on to the lands of Sudeten Germans, Bohemia and Moravia, now “lost” to Czechoslovakia, and on through the Danubian Basin from Hungary to Romania.

  In 1934, Mussolini opposed Hitler’s moves toward Austria, mobilized 500,000 Italian troops to protect its borders and preserve its independence. But in 1935, Hitler supported Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia; and in 1936 the military alliance to create fascist Spain terminated Mussolini’s opposition to the Anschluss.

  Hitler had intended to absorb Austria from the beginning. It was promised on the first page of Mein Kampf: Austria was German; union was inevitable. For years, Hitler had bombarded Austria with a relentless political warfare campaign, and he contributed vastly to Austria’s Nazi Party. On 12 February 1938, with no organized centers of resistance left in Vienna, Hitler demanded an audience with Kurt von Schuschnigg to give him an ultimatum: the nazification of Austria, or invasion and military occupation— another Spain.

  On 9 March, Schuschnigg resisted, and called for a plebiscite. But Hitler’s troops mobilized to cross the border. On 13 March, Hitler canceled the plebiscite and Schuschnigg capitulated: There was no resistance, no bloodshed. As Hitler’s army marched in, Austria’s police and military donned Nazi insignia, to join frenzied crowds who pelted 100,000 German troops with flowers as they invaded. Goebbels called it the Blumenkrieg, flower war. Vienna seemed a pageant of swastika banners and unbridled enthusiasm, as Austrians shouted: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!” As Austrian citizens were transformed into Nazi subjects, there were also thousands of silent, grieving onlookers. For the moment, ignored and unphotographed, they had been rendered irrelevant: Austria’s new wastepeople, democrats, Jews, anti-Nazi dissenters, in flight and despair. Seventy-five thousand were quickly rounded up, subject to the most sadistic public humiliations; there were more than two hundred suicides a day, and “many sickening incidents.” When Churchill asked why the press failed to report that part of the story, London Times editor Geoffrey Dawson replied: “There is no doubt… the impression of jubilation was overwhelming.”
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  Thousands of Austria’s most esteemed citizens had been instantly transformed into German Jews, without rights, without respect. In a country where generations of assimilation obscured a tradition of seething Jew hatred, a mischlinge citizenry of high culture and affluence was transformed overnight into beggary by a circus of derision and contempt. Gleeful mobs taunted and brutalized aged Jews forced to scrub sidewalks with toothbrushes, toilets with bare hands, reminding them of the forgotten promise of another century: Austria would be Judenrein—Jew-free.

  Now as Hitler ushered his homeland into his Reich, maniacal Jew-hatred became once again fashionable in cosmopolitan Vienna, the crossroads of European culture. From the diaspora through the medieval crusades to the various pogroms of modernizing Europe, Hitler’s creed was familiar.

  On 14 March, Churchill addressed the House of Commons: “The gravity” of the situation “cannot be exaggerated.” Vienna was the geographic link of Central Europe: “This mastery of Vienna gives to Nazi Germany military and economic control of the whole of the communications of Southeastern Europe, by road, by river, and by rail.”