Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  On 22 November 1938, ER embarked on a dangerous mission when she keynoted the radical biracial Southern Conference on Human Welfare, in Birmingham, Alabama. For the first time since the Civil War, Southern liberals were determined to face the race issue embedded within the region’s struggling economy. Since 1890 there had been talk of a “New South,” but always before, racial cruelties at the heart of peonage and poverty had been ignored in the interest of white supremacy. For decades, New South proponents echoed Henry Grady’s insistence on Negro degradation “because the white race is the superior race. This is the declaration of no new truth. It has abided forever in the marrow of our bones, and shall run forever with the blood that feeds Anglo-Saxon hearts.”

  Race defined the limits of change for all programs ER cared about, including Arthurdale and the efforts to build decent housing to replace Washington’s alley slums. Until race issues could be addressed frankly, nothing would really change.

  In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, there was a new level of commitment and urgency at the Birmingham meeting. Regional race and antiunion violence was behind the call for the SCHW, first conceived as a civil liberties conference by Joseph Gelders and Lucy Randolph Mason. According to Virginia Durr, they wanted to deal with the “terrible things happening” to CIO organizers in Mississippi. Many people were beaten; crosses were burned; the Wagner Labor Relations Act was held in contempt. In Tupelo, Ida Sledge, kin to the Bankheads of Alabama, sent by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, was run out of town. John Rankin represented Tupelo in Congress, and “he was anti-Semitic and anti-black and very much against unions.” He called everyone in the CIO a communist, and it was time for a meeting.

  The entire venture was fortified by FDR’s National Emergency Council’s study of the South, by Lowell Mellet, Arthur Raper, Lucy Randolph Mason, Frank Graham (president of the University of North Carolina), and Clark Foreman, with input from leading Southerners for the New Deal, including Virginia and Clifford Durr, Lister Hill, Senator John Sparkman, Tex Goldschmidt, and Abe Fortas. The Council’s Report on Economic Conditions of the South announced that the South was America’s economic problem number one.

  While the South “led the world” in cotton, tobacco, paper, and other products, it was a disaster area. The average per capita income was half the nation’s; the poll tax limited voting rights to 12 percent of the population in eight Southern states, including Virginia; the region’s children were being undereducated. The South was hampered by backward and colonial customs; and its entrenched leaders wanted no changes.

  The Southern Conference on Human Welfare determined to change the South and challenge segregation. Fifteen hundred delegates, black and white, sat anywhere they wanted Sunday night, 21 November 1938, in the city auditorium of downtown Birmingham. According to Virginia Durr: “Oh, it was a love feast…. Southern meetings always include a lot of preaching and praying and hymn singing…. The whole meeting was just full of love and hope. It was thrilling.” Frank Graham was elected chair, set a beautiful tone, “and we all went away … that night just full of love and gratitude. The whole South was coming together to make a new day.”

  Somebody reported the integrated seating at the opening-night gala, and the next morning the auditorium was surrounded by black Marias. Every police van in the city and county was there. Policemen were everywhere, inside and out. And there was Eugene “Bull” Connor “saying anybody who broke the segregation law of Alabama would be arrested.” Tensions escalated; violence was in the air. The delegates complied and arranged themselves into separate sections.

  ER, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Aubrey Williams arrived late that day, out of breath. ER “was ushered in with great applause,” looked at the segregated audience—and took her seat on the black side. One of Bull Connor’s police officers tapped ER on the shoulder and told her to move. ER noted in her memoirs: “At once the police appeared to remind us of the rules and regulations on segregation.”

  As if to announce fascism would not triumph here, ER refused to “give in” and placed her chair between the white and black sections. Pauli Murray recalled that ER’s demonstration of defiance and courage meant everything to the young people of the South, who now knew they were not alone. Although the national press did not report ER’s brave action, the weekly Afro-American editorialized: “If the people of the South do not grasp this gesture, we must. Sometimes actions speak louder than words.”

  ER was given a little folding chair and sat in the middle of whatever meeting hall or church she attended for the rest of the four-day meeting. She said she refused to be segregated, and carried the folding chair with her wherever she went. According to Durr: “Policemen followed us everywhere to make sure the segregation laws were observed, but they didn’t arrest Mrs. Roosevelt.”

  ER’s address to the SCHW stirred the packed auditorium:

  We are the leading democracy of the world and as such must prove to the world that democracy is possible and capable of living up to the principles upon which it was founded. The eyes of the world are upon us, and often we find they are not too friendly eyes.

  ER emphasized “universal education” in which “every one of our citizens, regardless of nationality, or race,” might be allowed to flourish.

  The next day, she participated in a workshop on youth problems, which organized a SCHW youth council to work directly with NYA and CCC. The workshop included former theology student turned radical Arkansas activist Howard Lee, Birmingham attorney Helen Fuller, and Myles Horton. ER was particularly impressed by Lee, who became chair of the new Council of Young Southerners—which ER personally supported—and then executive secretary of the SCHW.

  A dramatic moment occurred when Aubrey Williams joked about revolution. He was “a very jolly, funny fellow, always cracking jokes.” It was a throw-away line about the usefulness of “class warfare,” but it received endless radio coverage. The press milked it for days: Marxist WPA leader shows New Deal’s true content. FDR called Aubrey: “What are you and my wife doing down there? What do you mean by … saying you are for the revolution?”

  Aubrey, “heartsick,” went to ER and offered to resign. But she said, “You will do no such thing,” and immediately called her husband. FDR did not want Aubrey’s resignation; he wanted him “to quit making speeches.”

  Williams’s career was not over, but FDR refused to appoint him head of WPA to replace Hopkins, the job he actually did for two years, throughout Hopkins’s long illness and convalescence. ER felt personally betrayed when FDR instead appointed conservative Army engineer Colonel F. C. Harrington. Nevertheless, NYA was given significant authority and made a permanent agency, and ER felt fortified and encouraged by the burgeoning grassroots movements represented by the AYC and the SCHW. She believed that their determined activity would move the New Deal forward.

  The 1938 SCHW adopted thirty-six resolutions, all of which involved the plight of African-Americans, and eight of which directly concerned racial issues, including freedom for the four Scottsboro boys who remained in prison; availability of medical services by African-American physicians in all public health facilities; more funding for public housing and recreation facilities for African-Americans; equal funding for graduate education in state-supported colleges; and—inspired by ER’s demonstration—a resolution to support fully integrated SCHW meetings.

  Perceived as “one of the gravest sins that a white southerner could commit,” that direct assault against tradition created a furor. The antisegregation resolution divided the delegates, some of whom withdrew, and was branded communist, subversive, and un-American. On the other hand, it transformed national assumptions about the unspeakable: White supremacy, and its primary bulwark segregation, were forevermore on the nation’s agenda—put there by an integrated conference, led by Southern New Dealers.

  Traditional “race etiquette” was also challenged when Louise Charlton called on Mary McLeod Bethune to speak. According to Virginia Durr:

  She s
aid, “Mary, do you wish to come to the platform?” Mrs. Bethune rose. She looked like an African queen…. “My name is Mrs. Bethune.” So Louise had to say, “Mrs. Bethune, will you come to the platform?” That sounds like a small thing now, but that was a big dividing line. A Negro woman in Birmingham, Alabama, was called Mrs. at a public meeting….

  Virginia Durr, wife of Clifford Durr, the assistant general counsel of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and sister-in-law of Justice Hugo Black, addressed the meeting to denounce the South’s refusal to educate its people and the prevailing ignorance so general throughout the country. The reasons for an uninformed public, she declared, were propaganda and a controlled press dominated by Wall Street. She accused the National Manufacturers Association of being a “huge propaganda machine” intent on the “liquidation of organized labor.”

  From ER to Aubrey Williams to Virginia Durr, the sentiments expressed at the SCHW represented the outer borders of the New Deal. The SCHW was viciously attacked by conservatives, the KKK, and white citizens’ groups. SCHW delegates were accused of eating together, partying together, all the same “old dirt … it was disgusting….” But Virginia Durr and others were surprised by the attacks from their putative allies on the liberal left.

  ER and Durr knew that there were communists in attendance, and in every radical movement for decency and social change. Although not particularly interested in communists, ER insisted on her right to work with every ally for change she could find. Like ER, Durr wanted to see an alliance of all Southern radicals opposed to fascism, and she dismissed as ideological imprisonment “the intricate distinctions” between various communists, socialists, anarchists, and Trotskyites:

  All the different groups and isms used to bore me to death. I always felt it was exactly like the distinctions in religions—are you going to get to heaven by dipping or sprinkling or total immersion….

  In November 1938, FDR evidently felt the same way, and in his supportive message to the liberal leaders of the South he noted:

  It is heartening to see the strength of Southern social leadership mustered to face these human problems, not locally or individually, but in a United Front from Fort Raleigh to the Alamo.

  The SCHW represented an assemblage of the South’s best talents, dedicated to the hardest long-range issues.* The last night of the conference was like “a revival meeting. All of a sudden you felt that you were not by yourself,” lonely Southerners for change. Rather, ER and Justice Hugo Black, CIO leader John L. Lewis, Negro leaders from Mary McLeod Bethune to John Davis were prominent. It was “marvelous.”

  “It was the New Deal come south…. We had the feeling of having the power of the government on our side.” Bull Connor had the police but he wouldn’t arrest ER, and he wouldn’t arrest Hugo Black. And at the end, the auditorium packed to the roof, ER and all the leaders, white and black, stood “at the center of the stage” and sang for tomorrow. After four days in downtown Birmingham, everything seemed possible.

  Tommy had feared for ER’s life, but the New York Times failed to notice ER’s movable chair protest against segregation, and emphasized the economic changes called for. The SCHW had set new goals for the nation: a Federal Rural Housing Authority empowered to build one million Southern homes for $500 each, at one-tenth the cost of the new national defense program; more federal credit for farmers; federal aid for education; repeal of poll-tax laws; and a Wagner antilynching law in every state.

  ER left Birmingham filled with energy and plans for the future. With Tommy, she went to Georgia to join FDR for Thanksgiving. Hick, in New York, wondered: “How did you finally get away with the trip to Birmingham? Have they torn you limb from limb yet?”

  ER was unscathed, and rather excited. She wrote Hick: In addition to her speech, followed by questions for over an hour, she had long talks with Aubrey Williams and Lucy Randolph Mason, held a press conference, and presented her views in a panel on youth and another on women’s labor conditions. At one lunch she “argued at length with Gov Bibb Graves [about] the poll tax and the right of the Negro to vote.”

  But, she confided:

  Tommy doesn’t feel well on this trip. I think she was worried all day yesterday for fear I would get myself in trouble!

  We are going to get our hair washed and combed and our nails done before we drive down to Warm Springs this morning.

  As she toured the South, between Atlanta and Birmingham, ER had an idea that would reunite Hick to politics and bring her closer into ER’s own newly expanded orbit. Without preparation or discussion, ER asked Hick to consider taking over Molly Dewson’s job as head of the Women’s Democratic Committee. Surprised, Hick thought about ER’s offer overnight, and replied the next morning with unqualified enthusiasm:

  I’ve been thinking about that Democratic National committee business. If you want to ask Jim [Farley] about me, I think it might be a good idea. I’m not particularly anxious to leave the Fair at this time, but … if I should do it, I’d like to do a good, thorough job, and it might not be a bad idea to start even earlier than January, 1940…. I think I ought to make a swing around the country to contact my women’s editors, etc., and I might work them in together some way. It would be fun, wouldn’t it?

  Fun, and supremely important. FDR had lost many liberal battles since his overwhelming 1936 victory. Every New Deal agency was under attack, threatened with cuts, denounced as communist and dangerous. FDR promised to fight the reactionaries, and he rejected those advisers—including Farley—who urged him to move with his party to the right.

  ER talked with FDR about her plan:

  He’s much interested but doubts if Jim [Farley] wants a liberal Democratic party. I’ll talk to Jim soon and let you know how things develop. I’d rather see you in [the newspaper] business and yet this cries to be done and is most interesting….

  I don’t suppose I can reach you on Thanksgiving … so here is my love dear and may you have much to be thankful for.

  Hick agreed that Jim Farley was not much interested in a liberal party.

  But let’s hope he has the political acumen to keep it more liberal than the Republican party….

  Yes, my dear, I have much to be Thankful for—a great deal of that “much” being YOU.

  While ER was at Warm Springs, the Nazi press announced that Germany had embarked upon “the final and unalterably uncompromising solution” to the Jewish question. In the Gestapo’s official paper, Das Schwarze Korps, on 24 November, the front-page feature announced that it should have been done immediately, brutally, and completely in 1933. But “it had to remain theory” for lack of the “military power we possess today.”

  Because it is necessary, because we no longer hear the world’s screeching and because, after all, no power on earth can hinder us, we will now bring the Jewish question to its totalitarian solution.

  Two weeks after Kristallnacht, accepted without notable “screeching” from any government, Hitler felt sufficiently unrestrained to publish his intentions for all Jews caught in his widening web. First would come pauperization, isolation, ghettoization. They would all be marked for positive identification. Nobody would escape. Then, the starving, bedraggled remnant would become a scrounging, begging scourge. They would be forced to crime, would be an “underworld” of “politico-criminal subhumans,” breeders of Bolshevism. At that stage “we should therefore face the hard necessity of exterminating the Jewish underworld…. The result will be the actual and definite end of Jewry … and its complete extermination.”

  While the announcement was made two years and eight months before it was actually implemented, the time to protest and resist was at hand. After it was reprinted in the U.S. and European press, many understood the implications of such crude words given the reality of the cruelties under way in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Since Kristallnacht, race hatred had triumphed completely and Jews had been removed from all German institutions, doomed to a pariah existence in complete segregation. Jews could no longer
dine with Gentiles—not in restaurants, not anywhere; nor could they buy food in the same stores. Nazis established separate stores where Jews were restricted in the purchase of life’s staples—milk, bread.

  Such laws cast a torchlight on American traditions. ER made the connections: brown shirts, white sheets; the twisted cross, the burning cross. Yet the internal affairs of a nation were deemed sacrosanct, nobody else’s business. ER and other citizens no longer agreed with that diplomatic principle.

  Citizens of conscience petitioned FDR. Thirty-six prominent writers sent an urgent telegram, including Pearl Buck, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, John Gunther, Lillian Hellman, George S. Kaufman, Clifford Odets, Van Wyck Brooks, Dorothy Thompson, and Thornton Wilder:

  We feel we no longer have any right to remain silent, we feel that the American people and the American government have no right to remain silent. Thirty-five years ago a horrified America rose to its feet to protest against the Kishinev pogroms in Tsarist Russia. God help us if we have grown so indifferent to human suffering that we cannot rise now in protest against pogroms in Nazi Germany. We feel that it is deeply immoral for the American people to continue having economic relations with a country that avowedly uses mass murder to solve its economic problems.

  FDR remained virtually silent about human rights abuses, and did not end trade with Germany, but he began a vigorous rearmament program, emphasizing military planes and naval construction. Immediately after Kristallnacht, on 14 November, he reported to Josephus Daniels, his Wilson-era boss, that he was working on “national defense—especially mass production of planes.” By December, he ordered the navy yards to run full-time, “two shifts or even three” wherever possible. It “is time to get action.”

  While ER approved of all defense programs, she also called for a worldwide educational crusade to address prejudice. In November, at Warm Springs after the SCHW meetings, ER wrote her first articles specifically about Jews and race hatred. One, initially called “Tolerance,” was for the Virginia Quarterly and attacked the kind of anticommunist hysteria that had resulted in fascist triumph and appeasement throughout so much of Europe. The other, which addressed the mounting hatred against Jews, was dated 25 November 1938.