Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

In his vivid speech of doom and portent Churchill proposed a “Grand Alliance,” a united front “for mutual defence against aggression.” It “might even now arrest this approaching war.” Although Churchill spoke only of a united front comprised of the Little Entente with France and England, Russia responded immediately.

  Maxim Litvinov condemned the Anschluss as a dangerous act of aggression; it threatened all nations between the Soviet Union and the Reich. Russia was ready “to participate in collective actions” to check further aggression and eliminate the “danger of a new world massacre.” On 18 March the USSR officially proposed a conference to discuss a pact to create a Grand Alliance. On 24 March Chamberlain rejected the idea. Harold Nicolson, among other members of Parliament, now joined Churchill in despair: “The Tories think only of the Red danger and let the Empire slide.”

  Wounded by Chamberlain’s February rebuff, FDR said nothing about the Anschluss. ER read the papers in gloom; the “European situation” was cruel and incomprehensible. She used “Brotherhood Day,” sponsored by the National Council of Jews and Christians, to address Austria’s plight. The council had published “Ten Commandments of Good Will,” and ER recommended three of them particularly: “I will honor all men and women regardless of their race or religion.” “I will exemplify in my own life the spirit of good will and understanding.” And, “I will do more than live and let live, I will live and help live.”

  She hoped that the new commandments would “sink into every heart and be remembered every day….”

  On 15 March 1938, ER wrote FDR: “I fear this European situation has you all worried pink and I fear work is pretty bad but hope you’ll get away by the 20th….”

  By mid-March all the news was terrible. The cabinet understood that “matters in Spain are going badly,” and Franco’s troops had reached the Madrid side of the mountains. Heavily reinforced by additional Italian troops, Germany’s “best” planes and most lethal “war machines” caused unlimited destruction. In China, Japanese forces had crossed the Yellow River, and in Russia the “terrible purges” continued. People were condemned for crimes of twenty years before. Ickes wrote that “it certainly looks as if Stalin had gone mad, and Russia is rapidly losing what sympathy she has had among liberals….”

  It was a grim time, and FDR’s State Department, with few exceptions, was dominated by friends of fascism and appeasers. Rebuffed by England, his quarantine effort derided by isolationists and pacifists, FDR counseled continued silence. There was a sense of foreboding, but the rumbles were in the distance, and for the moment there was nothing to be done.

  On 17 March, ER wrote again: “Evidently Europe is not giving you deep concern and you plan to get away….”

  Throughout March, ER was on a lecture tour to promote This Troubled World—which had forecast the headlines and demanded urgent attention. She had warned that “future wars will have no fronts.” In Spain and China, war defied boundaries: “Gases and airplanes will not be directed only against armed forces.” They will be “used for breaking the morale… shelling unfortified cities, towns and villages, and the killing of women and children.” Modern war would involve “entire populations.”

  In Albuquerque, Santa Fe, El Paso, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, ER promoted collective security and urged Americans to reconsider isolationism. The future demanded a new level of concern and activism. She sought to create a groundswell of public opinion to move her husband’s policy along. Everywhere she went, her message was the same, and she sold many copies of her book.

  While nations everywhere readied their armies for war and plunder, she searched in vain for real leadership: “Few people are sitting down dispassionately to go over the whole situation in an attempt to determine what present conditions are, or how they should be met.”

  Since 1924 she had deplored apathy as a cause of war and called for a World Court that would condemn “war as murder.” In 1934, she called for “an active crusade that women the world over must undertake… with the youth of our countries. We have got to face the fact that there are economic causes which bring about war.”

  These economic causes had remained unaddressed since the disastrous Treaty of Versailles. International trade had been rendered too costly, tariffs too high, competition too unequal. Unless changes occurred, war would triumph; education was essential, a slow, wearying process that might seem “futile.” Nevertheless, ER insisted: “Faint heart, ne’er won fair lady, nor did it ever solve world problems!”

  Not an absolute pacifist, ER rejected unilateral disarmament. She defended FDR’s 1937 determination to reoutfit the U.S. Navy and dismissed Jeannette Rankin’s plan to retire the Navy since we no longer intended to involve ourselves in overseas wars. That, ER said, was virtual suicide “in a world which is arming all around us.”

  Convinced that Hitler and Mussolini had unlimited ambitions, ER told her press conference on 14 February 1938 that it was “unfortunately true that we live in a world where force is the only voice which carries conviction and weight.” She wished we lived instead “in a world where reason and patience prevailed,” but until “the strong nations of the world can agree to disarm, we must maintain our own forces.” She approved increased military spending and defended her husband’s $1.2 billion military expansion bill, although she noted: “I have always felt that taking the profits out of war was a very salutary thing.”

  In March, she said a united front of democratic nations determined to stop aggression might still derail the rush to war and catastrophe. But now among world leaders only Maxim Litvinov voiced any hope for collective action.

  With the League of Nations and World Court moribund, ER called, in her speeches and book, for some other negotiating body to resolve disputes and to be actually decisive: This was the heart of This Troubled World:

  We need to define what an aggressor nation is. We need to have a tribunal where the facts in any case may be discussed, and the decision made before the world….

  In total defiance of her husband’s policy, ER called for trade embargoes exclusively against aggressor nations, and when economic sanctions failed to deter an aggressor, a world “police force could be called upon.” This police force would not be an invading army, but a peacekeeping body, to prevent war, violence, mayhem.

  ER even criticized FDR’s limited Good Neighbor Policy. Although it ended “a bullying, patronizing attitude” toward Latin America, hemispheric progress was only a beginning: “We cannot be entirely satisfied with anything [that] does not include the world as a whole, for we are all so closely interdependent….”

  If we really wanted peace, ER insisted, we had to confront reality: The time to fight for peace was before war broke out. She counseled long-range goals that involved “a change in human nature.” Women understood how each individual family fight needed to be personally negotiated. Imagination, understanding, respect were key: Nations too often spoke of religious freedom, but “meant freedom only for their kind of religion.”

  ER considered the peace process akin to mountain climbing. There were no shortcuts from peak to peak. Humanity required patience, “vision and persistence,” to make “peaceful quiet progress… laboriously up the side of the mountain.”

  Ultimately, she concluded, humanity must understand that “what serves the people as a whole serves them best as individuals.” Unless we work to “change human nature… we are going to watch our civilization wipe itself off the face of the earth.”

  ER could not believe that anyone who had witnessed the last war, which had ended only twenty years earlier, could bear the thought of another: “I believe that anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would think of suicide.” Sometimes she felt despair about the “utter futility of human experience, feeling how deadly stupid we are.” She wondered why our past experiences did not better inform our present policies:

  How can we study history, how can we live through the things that we have lived through and complacently go on allowing th
e same causes over and over again to put us through those same horrible experiences? I cannot believe that we are going to go on being as stupid as that. If we are, we deserve to commit suicide—and we will!

  ER acknowledged the glamour and excitement of war. A friend had recently boasted to her that he could recruit young men anywhere to go to war in any part of the world. But, she countered, we needed to tell the truth about the ravages of war, the suffering and waste.

  ER called herself a “practical pacifist.” She toured the country speaking with peace societies, protesting war toys, calling for the elimination of profits in the munitions industry. She called for “government ownership” of munitions factories and wondered if the opponents to this idea were not self-interested investors “whose interests lie in this particular business.”

  Influenced by the Nye Committee and such books as The Merchants of Death, ER considered the arms trade and “private profit a great incentive” to war. In a democracy, she argued, freedom of the press and public accountability should combine with government ownership or “the strictest kind of government supervision” to control that profitability, “thus removing the incentive for constantly seeking and creating new markets” for war. Then we might consider world disarmament, with inspection procedures, but “very gradually I am sure,”

  ER ended her essay and lectures with a call for love as a principle in life, and in diplomacy:

  We can establish no real trust between nations until we acknowledge the power of love above all other powers….

  We must reach a point where we can recognize the rights and needs of others, as well as our own rights and needs.

  For ER this involved a great spiritual revival, a “new code of ethics” based on “an awakening sense of responsibility” for others. If our civilization merited preservation, “then our people must turn” to love, “not as a doctrine but as a way of living.”

  You laugh, it seems fantastic, but this subject [love] will, I am sure, have to be discussed throughout the world for many years before it becomes an accepted rule. We will have to want peace, want it enough to pay for it, pay for it in our own behavior and in material ways. We will have to want it enough to overcome our lethargy and go out and find all those in other countries who want it as much as we do….

  Love was for ER the great driving principle of life, and politics. She did not consider it an endless battleground, but a continual arena for study, compromise, pleasure, fulfillment, and negotiation. While ER lectured about peace, she continued her negotiations with her loved ones.

  When ER toured the Southwest, Hick spent time at the White House entertaining little Diana Hopkins, who moved her deeply. She wrote three pages about Diana’s efforts to cope with her loneliness in that great house, concluding: “You know there are only three members of this household for whom I have any affection; they are you, Tommy and Mabel.”

  ER was particularly irked to have no communication from her husband: “I’ve not had a line from the WH. No letter, no wire, nothing since I left a week ago Sunday. I’ve wired & written twice and I am now going on strike!”

  But on 17th March, FDR telephoned, and she also received his letter. She was relieved to hear; it was their thirty-third anniversary. But her reply was cool: Her lectures went well, and “the audiences are very good.” She was sorry to hear his wisdom tooth had to be removed, and hoped “it gives you as little trouble as mine gave me.” She sent FDR “best wishes for the 17th and much love.”

  Things were strained in their partnership. ER wrote her daughter that FDR had telephoned, “the first word from the WH since I left! All seems well….”

  Actually all was not well. ER was still angry about Betsey’s role in the White House, which contributed to Betsey’s marital difficulties. She and James were now estranged, which only seemed to intensify FDR’s closeness to Betsey. ER was mystified to hear that he now planned to go to Warm Springs with Betsey at the end of March.

  ER wrote Anna in confused and veiled tones:

  James is doing 2 weeks with the Marines…. there is a chance that Bets may go with Pa to Warm Springs. I don’t understand it all but it seems very pleasant all around so I shouldn’t worry I suppose!”

  With Tiny in California on the 17th, ER visited NYA and WPA projects, including a crippled-children’s hospital, “one of the best I ever saw…. This is a busy world!” It was also a successful tour.

  In letters to her husband, ER downplayed the public significance of her lectures. But FDR’s friend James Metcalf wrote the president with enthusiasm. He and his wife, Adelaide, who was vice president of the California Federation of Democratic Women’s Study Clubs, had been dazzled by ER’s address: “It’s my opinion that your Wife is bringing you nearer to the People than you’ve ever been before—and during the past five years you’ve been closer to the Heart of the Nation than any of your predecessors.”

  FDR appreciated that ER’s work benefited him in countless ways. He relied upon her ability to get out and meet the people, and he trusted her to introduce controversies and her own convictions, not only to test the political climate but to move public opinion. But their disagreements were often profound, and every program they both cared about was under siege by aggressive conservatives in Congress.

  During the spring of 1938, ER’s concerns focused on the “work projects” of the National Youth Administration and the WPA. She wanted them to meet “the needs of different racial groups.” ER’s priorities were not among FDR’s priorities, and their gravest differences remained the world crises.

  On the 18th, Hick wrote of her visit with FDR:

  My dear: I thought I told you I had seen the President last Sunday…. He was very cordial and asked me to stay to lunch…. He didn’t seem to be particularly worried about the European situation…. But he was apparently very much concerned-about the tax bill….

  ER left her West Coast tour to meet FDR and his party in Warm Springs, where Betsey’s presence made her feel irrelevant. She wrote Hick that it seemed “too much trouble to go and swim alone,” and besides she had to go to Fort Benning “to see FDR drive by the troops.”

  Everything about the visit annoyed ER. She felt trapped, and useless. Harry Hopkins was also there, recovering from cancer surgery. He was thin and weary, and ER worried about him, “but for Diana’s sake I hope I am all wrong.”

  While ER was discontent in Warm Springs, Hick was in New York, with evenings at the opera and theater: Tristan, which was “lovely beyond description,” and Pins and Needles: “Isn’t it the freshest thing?” It “makes the average Broadway musical show look sick.”

  ER also loved Pins and Needles and was “so glad” Hick agreed. On the 30th, Hick told ER that Edna Gellhorn had written that Martha had returned to Spain: “The glorious little fool.”

  April began with Harry Hopkins and Aubrey Williams working all day to prepare their defense of WPA and NYA costs before Congress. “Quite an ordeal,” ER noted, but worth it. FDR responded favorably.

  During the winter, unemployment had soared, arid New Deal programs seemed doomed by FDR’s budget cuts. By April 1938, the U.S. economy had lost “two-thirds of the gains made since March 1933.” FDR’s romance with a balanced budget finally ended, and he called for emergency appropriations.

  With an estimated twelve to fourteen million unemployed, FDR returned to his election promises. On 14 April, he asked Congress to increase relief expenditures by $3.7 billion: $1.25 billion for WPA, $150 million for the Farm Security Administration, $50 million each for CCC and NYA. He wanted the U.S. Housing Authority to have $300 million of additional slum clearance projects, and an additional $100 million federal aid to highways, and an additional $37 million for flood control, and more. These funds were to ensure the well-being of the majority of Americans and to guarantee the survival of American democracy: Around the world democracy disappeared, because people grew “tired of unemployment and insecurity.”

  To abandon our purpose of building a greater, a mo
re stable and a more tolerant America, would be to miss the tide and perhaps to miss the port. I propose to sail ahead….

  Henry Morgenthau disagreed, and threatened to resign. But Congress complied. ER was relieved. It had been a year of delays, a long period of inaction and loss. Now the fair labor standards bill, which promised minimum wages and maximum hours of work and outlawed child labor, stood a chance.

  After the Anschluss, ER began to confront directly the rising tide of anti-Semitism at home and abroad. She wrote earnest letters of explanation to promote “tolerance” and supported countless Jewish organizations. Every letter sent to her received attention. She pursued visas, sought to reunite families, protested deportation proceedings, worked to find people jobs, housing, general support.

  She endorsed the work of a small group of women in Irvington, New Jersey, representing the Daughters of Israel Malbish Arumim Society, who asked her to greet contributors of “clothing and other necessities” for the poor in a souvenir journal to be distributed at their annual concert and ball. On 11 April she sent greetings to the Glen Cove Jewish Ladies Aid Society, working to repair their temple. In May she hosted a tea for the ladies of B’nai B’rith at the White House. One of her guests that day, Doris Bernstein of Chicago, expressed the sentiments of many: “Your charm and your marvellous hospitality will remain with me for years….”

  Nazi victories in Europe had a dramatic impact on U.S. politics. Fascist groups were strong throughout the country, and anti-Semitism became more virulent. In the United States, no less than in Europe, a renewed Red Scare was under way. As in 1919–21, when the anticommunist reign of A. Mitchell Palmer enabled agents to sweep through America’s cities against Reds and suspected Reds, unionists and immigrants were once again rounded up, hounded, threatened with deportation.

  In January 1938, the National Council of Jewish Women appealed to ER to consider “the tragic plight” of two endangered young people.