Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Chamberlain, Daladier, Hider, and Mussolini met without Czech, Russian, or U.S. representatives. At 1:00 A.M. on 30 September, Hider obtained everything he asked for. “Daladier and Chamberlain never pressed for a single concession from Hitier.” Czechoslovakia, “asked to make all the sacrifices” for Europe’s peace, “was not consulted here at any stage of the talks.”

  Chamberlain returned to London triumphant, claiming “peace with honour,” delighted to report that Britain and Germany had pledged “never to go to war with one another again.”

  Winston Churchill spoke of “total and unmitigated defeat.” Leonard Woolf called it “peace without honour” and imagined it would last perhaps six months. Parliament, by an overwhelming majority, upheld the betrayal of Czechoslovakia.

  ER wrote her husband: “The poor Czechs! I don’t somehow like the role of England and France do you? We can say nothing however for we wouldn’t go to war for someone else—”

  FDR agreed with his wife, and at a cabinet meeting compared the “outrage” committed at Munich by Britain and France to Judas Iscariot’s. He believed British public opinion opposed Chamberlain’s peace-at-any-price diplomacy, and he anticipated a long and tragic air war, with England, France, and Russia united and the United States neutral, though economically supportive of the Allies.

  Furious and humiliated to have been excluded from the negotiations, Russia abandoned Litvinov’s quest for collective security and declared a policy of complete isolation.

  On 4 September, at a ceremony in Bordeaux for Americans who had fought during World War I, William Bullitt said if war broke out in Europe “no one can say or predict whether the U.S. would be drawn into such a war.” That statement might have given Hitler pause. But in mid-September, FDR rejected Bullitt’s warning:

  Ambassador Bullitt’s speech does not constitute a moral engagement on the part of the U.S. toward the democracies…. To include the U.S. in an alliance [with] France and Great Britain against Hitler is an interpretation by the political analysts one hundred percent false.

  From Hitler’s perspective, his victory at Munich was total: The United States was out of the picture; Europe was in disarray and opposed to a Soviet alliance. During the postwar Nuremberg Trials, Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler’s chief of staff, was asked by the Czech counsel: “Would the Reich have attacked Czechoslovakia in 1938 if the Western Powers had stood by Prague?” Keitel answered: “Certainly not. We were not strong enough militarily. The object of Munich was to get Russia out of Europe, to gain time, and to complete the German armaments.”

  Also, the United States had sent mixed signals to the Allies about supplies. According to French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet: “At the moment of the Munich crisis, Ambassador Bullitt told me that the U.S. could not sell us the airplanes which we had asked them for.”

  Internationalism was dead; the Soviets were bitter; the Poles and Hungarians marched to Berlin for their new territories to be carved out of Czech borderlands; and Hitler planned his next move.

  Churchill, still the loudest voice for resistance against Hitler in Britain, assessed the damage of Munich and foretold tragedy:

  All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness.

  I find unendurable the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany….

  [We] have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far… the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged…. This is only the beginning….

  The cruel personal humiliations of Jews instituted in Austria were repeated in Czechoslovakia and intensified everywhere throughout the greater Reich. During the spring and summer of 1938, there was widespread panic and flight. As the Czech crisis mounted, ER received an urgent letter from Gertrude Ely.

  One of ER’s least known but most interesting friends, a philanthropist and pillar of Bryn Mawr society, Ely had spent part of the summer in Germany and Austria, and since her return she had received letters of anguish and hope from both Christians and Jews. She sent “one of many” to ER from “a well known archaeologist in Berlin.” Ely was impressed especially by his “unselfishness.” “He is not a Jew himself,” and Ely thought his letter would move ER as she had been moved: “It is almost impossible for us to realize over here the utter despair of most of those people.”

  Ely’s correspondent, Dr. Emil Forrer, had been one of countless guests at her Bryn Mawr place, Wyndham Barn, known for sparkling conversation and evenings of music. His purpose was to introduce her to the needs of “a neighborly Jewish family with son and daughter of 16 and 17 years.” The father had lost his business and was cut off from all work by a new law to take effect 1 October. Survival depended on their leaving Germany. For this they needed an affidavit that they would not become “a burden to the state,” and they knew no one. “They are all extremely industrious and assiduous,” all clever, able, good at everything.

  [The] daughter takes care of the big garden, the chickens and rabbits which they have; she could go as housemaid. The mother could sew or do tailoring for other people…. They wish to remain together and they would prefer some position out in the country….

  He therefore begged Ely for affidavits for these four people, the Fritz Putziger family: “I am the only hope for them, and you the only hope for me.”

  ER wrote Gertrude Ely of her interest, but said she had at the moment nothing really to offer, beyond her recommendations about the humanitarian work of Clarence Pickett’s American Friends Service Committee.

  Although FDR wanted to help find compatible spaces for refugees, he did nothing to ease the rigid refugee rules. The United States was locked into a particularly vicious anti-Semitic, frankly racist campaign. Moreover, members of his State Department were unsympathetic to refugees.

  In London, Joseph Kennedy counseled complete uninvolvement. London’s radical newsletter published by left investigative journalist Claude Cockburn, The Week, quoted Kennedy as assuring his Cliveden friends that U.S. policy was “a Jewish production” and FDR would “fall in 1940.” Kennedy was ecstatic over Munich: “Isn’t it wonderful?” he crooned to an astounded Jan Masaryk, then Czechoslovakia’s minister to London: “Now I can get to Palm Beach after all!”

  While more flamboyant than most, Kennedy’s views were shared on every level of FDR’s State Department. Even Cordell Hull, who had a Jewish wife, wanted to do nothing, to say nothing, to upset Hitler or Mussolini. William Bullitt’s repeated anti-Semitic outbursts horrified more sensitive ears. As ambassador to Russia, Bullitt had described Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov’s press secretary and later ambassador to the United States, Constantine Oumansky, as “a wretched little kike…. It is perhaps only natural that we should find the members of that race more difficult to deal with than the Russians themselves.” From Paris, Bullitt’s correspondence with his colleagues continued to be sprinkled with curious details about Jews, often unsubstantiated, generally in “poisonous” tones.

  Bullitt’s State Department colleagues shared his views, and they had more immediate authority over the future of “that race.” Jay Pierrepont Moffat, assistant secretary of state and division chief for European affairs (1933–40), consistently opposed sanctions against Germany and argued for increased business and trade with Hitler. Educated at Groton and Harvard, Moffat was incensed when Harvard’s president, James Conant, withdrew an invitation for Hitler’s primary publicist, Ernst Hanfstaengl, to be honored at Harvard’s 1934 commencement. Good Cambridge fellows ought to resist the pressure of “all the Jews in Christendom [who] arose in protest.” Moffat was consistent. While posted to Warsaw he advised a colleague to be wary of Litvinov: He had “the malevolent look of an untidy Jew.”

  In Dublin, Ambassador John Cudahy originally worried little about Nazi violence and had earlier compared Hitler’s brownshirts to college boys, not unlike a “fraternal order.” Later more repelled by atrocities, he nevertheless intended to se
e the situation “realistically”:

  [The] handling of the Jews, [while] shocking and revolting, is from any realistic or logical approach a purely domestic matter and none of our business. It is not stretching the analogy too far to say that Germany would have just as much warrant to criticize our handling of the Negro minority if a race war between blacks and whites occurred in the United States.

  In a climate of rapidly escalating hatred, ER and her friends at the AFSC were rudely treated when they demanded official changes in U.S. refugee policies. After November 1938, it became one of ER’s most abiding issues.

  Even before the European tragedies and the refugee crisis were added to ER’s agenda, Hick wrote with wonder:

  How do you manage to do all you do, anyway? There is one thing, though, that makes life easier for you. That is that you always have servants. You don’t have to cook or wash dishes or make beds or fix the laundry. All those things take so much time—and so much energy. Just keeping people fed, and the house in order. Seeing that the fire in the fireplace doesn’t go out….

  ER replied that all busy women needed staff: “I think I should give you as a Xmas present an efficient maid to move from city to country with you and take care of you. It would be more useful than money towards your car, wouldn’t it?”

  No matter how difficult or elusive Hick became, ER trusted her, needed and enjoyed her company. She relied on her for honest advice as she had on Louis Howe. She offered various dates and persisted despite Hick’s repeated refusals. “Your work sounds hectic and so does your social life!” “I am anxious for a glimpse of you and sometime before long I’d like an evening!”

  On the 21st they finally lunched together after weeks apart; ER wrote:

  It was good to see you today. I do love to talk to you for you are stimulating…. I went back and did two columns and Hall made me look at some movies of the German plane and then I picked up Cousin Henry [Parrish] and drove out here [to the Parrishes’ country place, Llewellyn Park, in Orange, New Jersey] in quite a storm and wondered if you were having more rain and wind. It seemed to be clear tonight….

  ER had driven through the preliminary head winds of the ferocious hurricane of 1938, which coincided with the Munich crisis. She wrote Hick the next day: “I do hope you found the Danas, Ross, and the ‘little house’ safe. I fear all the Beach people suffered and Fire Island and West Hampton sounded horrible. Doesn’t one feel helpless when nature gets going?”*

  For weeks, everybody around ER focused on the great eastern storm of 1938. It only moderately wrecked the Hudson River Valley: “Our cellars here are flooded and no furnace but it isn’t very cold!” It had, however, bashed Long Island, Connecticut, and the coast. Neither Hick nor Esther Lape could write or think of anything else. From Coram to Mastic it looked like the ravages of a typhoon combined with a biblical flood. It seemed to Hick “that there could hardly be a tree left standing in the woods.” She arrived at the entrance to the Dana place just as dark was falling:

  I started in on our road, drove about a block, with branches of fallen trees sweeping the top of the car, and found myself blocked. A huge pine lying right across the road. I can hardly describe to you my sensations. It was dark now. Not a sound—not even any katydids. And that tree lying there, the branches so green and fresh. It was like looking at a person who had just died.

  With one feeble flashlight, Hick and a young neighbor set out on foot; they “climbed and crawled over what seemed like a solid mass of fallen trees” for over a mile.

  I shall not soon forget that night, my dear. The further we went, the more hopeless it seemed to me. I did not see how any living thing could have survived….

  Finally, after about an hour and a half, we came to a tractor. We were almost up to the Dana house by this time, and they had managed to clear the road that far. They had literally sawed their way through the thick trunks of big trees!

  From that point on, we ran…. Then I saw a light. And I heard a motor running—the Danas’ Delco [generator].

  Well—I found them all alive, even Prinz, who had had a narrow escape. All camped in the Dana house, which wasn’t hurt at all….

  But the trees, dear—not a single one of those beautiful old locusts around the Little House is left. And practically every tree around the Dana house, including that beautiful old apple tree in the courtyard. The houses stick up now, wholly bare. Ella says the place looks like a brand new real estate development….

  Although no one perished, Hick and her friends were plunged in gloom:

  For the time being, at least, all that I loved so much down there is gone—the peace and the beauty of it. Maybe it will come back some day…. I pray that it will. That place down there and what it gave me—they were about the only things left in the world that I cared about…. Why is it that as soon as I get to care about or depend oh any one or anything it must always be taken away from me?…

  ER mourned the devastation, but at the White House “the hurricane is eclipsed by the world situation which keeps FDR on edge all the time.” “No one can think of much else these days.” ER was philosophic: FDR had decided because of Europe’s uncertainty not to go “to HP tomorrow and of course he is right but if we are in for a long pull, we’ll have to do many of these normal things or everyone will go under.”

  The ferocity of nature’s storm, which destroyed so much everyone close to ER valued, only highlighted the madness of war, which would destroy everything. ER sent Hick her autumn itinerary through the Northeast, which had not been canceled by the storm. She planned to visit Esther and Elizabeth en route. Their place in Connecticut “suffered much as yours did…. In case you have forgotten, my love again, Madame.”

  The hurricane of 1938 was the most vicious storm since the great hurricane of 1815. For ER’s friends the international news made the storm of the century both metaphor and portent.

  On the 27th, two days before Munich, when war still seemed certain, Hick apologized for having written “so feverishly yesterday about my troubles.”

  After all, with another world war imminent, little things like a house in the country and trees, with the peace they contributed to one individual, aren’t so very important, are they?…

  I wonder if you feel as depressed about the whole thing as I do…. I do think the President’s message [urging continued negotiations] was swell….

  ER replied: “F said he’s done the last thing he can do and we can all pray something moves Hitler tomorrow. What a mad man!”

  As she proceeded through the Northeast, ER observed the wreckage philosophically:

  I don’t know that it will cheer you, but nature does cover up her ravages quickly as I realized in France after the war and next spring you will find new beauties which it is impossible to imagine now.

  She felt more foreboding about Europe. After the Munich agreement, FDR cabled Chamberlain: “Good man.” But ER doubted the pact served any significant purpose. She wrote Anna:

  Pa’s second message was grand and so well timed. I feel of course that Hitler having acquired all he wanted this time will begin again to get the next thing he wants when he is ready to do so. Therefore we have only postponed a war unless we are prepared to let Hitler and his ideas dominate Europe. It does not seem to be our business really and yet I wonder if we can remain uninfluenced by the growth of those ideas.

  ER dreaded the idea of a fascist peace, and she spent part of her days during the Munich crisis reading Thomas Mann’s book The Coming Victory of Democracy. She sent it on to Anna and John:

  I’d like to know what you both think about it. I would like to get an opportunity to talk to [Thomas Mann] in the light of recent events, for he stirred many questions in my mind.

  On 23 September, ER devoted a column to the profound shift she felt in her own thinking after she read Mann’s book. He had toured the United States in the hope that Americans would respond to the tragedies that now blanketed Europe. Thomas Mann no longer believed that democracy anywhere
would survive unless it responded with vigor to the vile circumstances imposed by the fascists: “Force must be met with force.”

  ER wrote that that was “what we had been doing from generation to generation.” She had believed that military violence in itself settled nothing, and was its own evil: an evil that always intensified the “bitterness that we built up before.” Now she felt that the alternative was to permit those nations that believed “exclusively in force, to have everything their own way.” The pacifist’s dilemma was troublesome:

  If we decide again that force must be met with force, then is it the moral right for any group of people who believe that certain ideas must triumph, to hold back from the conflict?

  ER rapidly moved toward a commitment to what was subsequently derided in the United States as “premature antifascism.” Before 1941 it was deemed un-American, practically treasonous, certainly radical or communist, really to oppose Hitler and fascism sufficiently to contemplate war as a lesser evil. It was the dilemma answered by thousands of Europeans who joined the International Brigades, by thousands of Americans who marched off to Spain in the Lincoln and Washington Brigades. ER was sympathetic to their decision and agreed with their purpose. But she hated war; it only spawned further war. There were no final victories. There had to be another way to settle conflicts. But Hitler was an aggressive madman, and Munich inflamed his ambitions.

  Like other antifascists who opposed war, ER was torn about the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia. “Czechoslovakia was set up in an arbitrary way” at Versailles, she wrote, “and my whole feeling is that the question should have been discussed in a calm atmosphere and not at the point of a pistol.” Her heart divided, she wrote an Allenswood chum, Helen Gifford, in Britain: