The training of the eight Negroes went forward. “The first runs were tough,” William Barber recalled. “People spit at me. I almost lost my temper, but I said, No, I’ll just take it. I’m setting an example. And gradually things settled down. I remember one day a woman with a bad attitude came in. I called her stop and she missed it. She started screaming at me. ‘Look, lady,’ I said. ‘If you don’t leave in one minute, one or the other of us is going to be meeting our maker very soon.’ With that, everyone on the bus burst into cheers and the lady shut up.”
Negro newspapers were exultant at the turn of events. “The impossible has happened,” the Pittsburgh Courier declared, “history has been made! Negro Americans are operating Philadelphia Transit Company Trolley Cars on regular passenger runs in various sections of the city.” The Courier observed that surveys showed that 52 percent of the citizens of the city were in favor of Negroes’ operating trolley cars if they were qualified. Over time, the integration of Negro workers into the transit force proved so satisfactory and was so well received by the public that the company opened up additional opportunities for Negro motormen. Philadelphia was the crowning achievement of the FEPC.
More progress followed. By the end of the war, the number of black workers in manufacturing had increased by six hundred thousand, to a total of two million, while those enrolled in unions had risen by seven hundred thousand. The percentage of Negroes employed in war production had risen from 2.5 percent to nearly 10 percent. More important, Negroes had made significant breakthroughs in access to more highly skilled positions as foremen, craftsmen, and operatives. “These changes,” observed Robert Weaver, a Negro authority on employment and housing, represented “more industrial and occupational diversification for negroes than had occurred in the 75 preceding years.”
Significant increases were also reported in the number of Negroes in government service. In 1938, despite the large Negro population in Washington, D.C., Negroes represented only 8.4 percent of all federal employees; by 1944, their percentage had grown to 19, the number rising from sixty thousand to two hundred thousand. In 1938, nine out of ten Negroes in federal service were custodians; in 1944, the percentage who were custodians had dropped to 40.
“With more and better employment opportunities,” Jacqueline Jones wrote in Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, “black men gained a new measure of self-respect, which, in turn, affected family relationships.” One young woman said her father felt “proud and happy” when he went from selling junk and cleaning cesspools to a carpenter’s job at a nearby military base.
To be sure, economic necessity, in the form of the growing labor shortage during the war, played as great a role as the FEPC in forcing companies to open their doors to Negroes. But, as Louis Ruchames concluded in his study of Executive Order 8802, the FEPC “brought hope and confidence” into the lives of Negroes. “The government of the United States was now doing something to help them, and in defending that government, and the country it represented, they were defending their own destiny and future.”
• • •
On August 20, Roosevelt escaped for the weekend to Hyde Park. There was “a decided nip in the air,” Hassett observed, “a reminder of waning summer.” The days had more early fall than late summer in them; darkness came sooner; and, Eleanor wistfully noted as she walked through the woods, the first autumn colors were beginning to show in the trees. “I am afraid before long the summer days will come to an end,” she wrote in her column, “and all of us will feel that we have to return to our routine occupations.”
The Big House was filled with visitors when Roosevelt arrived. “Too many,” Hassett observed, “all ages, sexes and previous conditions of servitude—hardly relaxing for a tired man.” Assorted children and grandchildren were there, along with Henry Kaiser and his wife, Sam Rosenman, Trude Pratt, and two veterans who had lost their legs overseas. Feeding this multitude was not an easy chore, Hassett noted, made harder by the fact that neither the president nor Tommy was allowed to eat what everyone else was eating. “Mrs. Roosevelt never noticed I didn’t eat anything,” Tommy complained to Esther Lape. “She is very impatient with the President because he has to stick to a diet.”
It was Eleanor’s good fortune, but also her undoing in her relations with ailing family and friends, to enjoy excellent health. Not once during the preceding four years had illness forced her to stay in bed, she rarely contracted colds, she almost never suffered from indigestion, and she once boasted that she had never had a headache. “She feels if she ignores anything that is wrong with anyone, it won’t exist,” Tommy observed.
But even Eleanor could not will away her husband’s declining health. “Pa complains of feeling tired and I think he looks older,” she admitted to Anna. “I can’t help worrying about his heart.” To Lash she expressed similar worries about “whatever he had last spring,” but in the end, she concluded, as long as “he still feels his experience and equipment will help him do a better job than [Republican nominee Thomas Dewey],” he would go forward.
Eleanor remained at Hyde Park when the president returned to Washington the morning of the 23rd. At noon, as word of the liberation of Paris reached the White House, Roosevelt met with Stimson. “This is a great day,” Stimson observed. Parisians came out into the streets by the tens of thousands to welcome their liberators with flags, flowers, and wine. The triumphant news buoyed Roosevelt’s spirits. “He was in better physical form than I expected,” Stimson noted, “and was very warm and cordial.”
Later that same day, Roosevelt was wheeled to the South Portico, where Anna and Lucy Rutherfurd were waiting for him, along with Lucy’s daughter, Barbara, and her stepson John. Tea and biscuits were served for a relaxing hour.
A week later, Roosevelt managed to see Lucy again, this time at Tranquility Farms, her summer estate in northern New Jersey. En route to Hyde Park for the Labor Day weekend, Roosevelt had his train rerouted from his traditional B & O route to the Pa-Leigh route, which allowed him to stop at Allamuchy. The unexpected stop took some of the passengers by surprise. Sara’s old cook, Mary Campbell, was greatly concerned, Hassett noted, “when we laid over in New Jersey and she expected to wake in Highland,” but no one, not even the three press reporters, who hardly looked up from their card-playing when told the train would be delayed for a few hours, sought to find out where the president was going.
Lucy later told her friend Elizabeth Shoumatoff about the pleasure of seeing Roosevelt in her own home, with its mountain lake, deer park, and thousands of acres of land. Prior to the visit, the house was in an uproar, as servants cleaned the rugs and polished the tables. “You’d think the president was coming,” one of Lucy’s employees commented. “He is,” Lucy proudly announced. Lucy had a special phone installed to receive foreign calls, and she listened as Roosevelt talked with Churchill. Churchill was recovering from a bout of pneumonia. He was feeling better, he told Roosevelt that day, and was confident he could get away for their seventh summit conference, planned for Quebec the following week. “I hope you will pardon a further transgression of the Teheran scale,” Churchill went on, alluding to the problems he had caused at Teheran by bringing his daughter after Roosevelt had told Eleanor and Anna no women were allowed. “I am planning to bring Mrs. Churchill with me,” he said. “Perfectly delighted that Clemmie will be with you,” Roosevelt replied. “Eleanor will go with me.”
Roosevelt’s visit with Lucy lasted only a couple of hours; he returned to the train in time for a late-afternoon arrival at Highland Station. But he had enjoyed his stopover so much that he asked the Secret Service later that night if the Allamuchy run could be used every now and then as an alternate route to Hyde Park. After careful study, the Secret Service concluded it was satisfied with the safety of the new route even though this required going over the Hell’s Gate Bridge in New York. Delighted, Roosevelt smiled and said “he didn’t believe the bridge would be blown up during his transit.”
Eleanor was waiting at the sta
tion when her husband arrived. She had prepared a special dinner for the two of them at Val-Kill, away from the bustle of the Big House. In her cottage, without the ghost of her mother-in-law hovering around, she could relax, share a drink with her husband in the dusk, and listen to the familiar sounds of a country evening.
• • •
A week later, Franklin and Eleanor journeyed to Quebec, arriving at Wolfe’s Cove twenty minutes earlier than the prime minister. Roosevelt had made sure to arrive first, so that he could be on the platform, along with the American chiefs of staff, to welcome his old friend. “I’m glad to see you,” the president boomed as the prime minister, carrying a cane, stepped from the train. “Look,” Roosevelt said, waving a hand toward his wife, “Eleanor’s here”; by that time, Mrs. Churchill had spied Mrs. Roosevelt and shouted, “Hello there.”
The exuberant scene, Lord Ismay observed, “was more like the reunion of a happy family starting on a holiday than the gathering of sedate Allied war leaders for an important conference . . . . To see them together, whether at work or play, was a joy.” Eleanor enjoyed the scene as well. “There is something boyish about the PM,” she noted, as she watched him with her husband. “Perhaps that is what makes him such a wonderful war leader.”
At lunch, Eleanor recalled, a spirited conversation evolved, during which Churchill twitted her about their differences of opinion on various subjects, most notably Franco’s Spain. In her column written later that day, Eleanor delighted in the notion that she had reached a point in life where she could disagree with people on certain things and still remain friends. “I assured him I had not changed, and neither had he, but we like each other nonetheless.” But, in the days that followed, Churchill insisted on bringing up Spain at every meal. “He talks picturesquely, but I’m tempted to say stupidly at times,” Eleanor confided to Joe Lash. At one point, he became “very much upset,” asserting that he had never said what she was quoting him as saying, but she refused to pull back, calling on the Morgenthaus, who had been present when he spoke, to back her up.
“I think he likes me,” Eleanor wrote Esther Lape, “but I also think that he feels women should be seen and not heard on any subject of public interest.” In keeping with Churchill’s attitudes—and, indeed, with the prevailing opinion of the day—the women were not allowed to join the men at any of the official sessions of the conference. “The ladies’ duties are all social,” Eleanor complained to Elinor Morgenthau. “It seems like such a waste of time.” Though the hours she spent with Mrs. Churchill were pleasurable—they went shopping together one morning, and one afternoon took a trip into the countryside, where they sipped tea on a rug in a lovely field—she was unable, she wrote, to grow intimate quickly. It would all be insufferable, she told Elinor, “except for the meals with a few people when PM and F are entertaining.”
The first plenary session opened on Wednesday, September 13. “Optimism was at its height,” army historians record. Allied forces had entered Belgium and Luxembourg and had seized a series of bridges over river and canal lines in Holland. It was believed that the German armies in the west had been so “decisively weakened by the battles since D-day” that they would collapse if momentum could be sustained. The major topic of discussion was how to prevent another war with Germany. Everyone agreed that the German army should be destroyed and the Nazi leaders severely punished, but Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau had in recent weeks devised a far more drastic plan that called for turning Germany into an agricultural nation by obliterating the industrial resources of the Ruhr. Though Stimson was “utterly opposed to the destruction of such a great gift of nature,” Roosevelt had invited Morgenthau to Quebec to explain his proposal to Churchill.
“I had barely got underway,” Morgenthau later recalled, “before low mutters and baleful looks” indicated the prime minister’s strong opposition. “After I finished my piece he turned loose on me the full flood of his rhetoric, sarcasm and violence. He looked on . . . the Treasury plan, he said, as he would on chaining himself to a dead German . . . . I have never had such a verbal lashing in my life.”
“I’m all for disarming Germany,” Churchill said, “but we ought not to prevent her living decently. There are bonds between the working classes of all countries and the English people will not stand for the policy you are advocating. I agree with Burke. You cannot indict a whole nation.”
The president sat by, saying very little, waiting for the tempest to pass. It did. The next day, after being told by Privy Councillor Lord Cherwell that the Treasury Plan would save Britain from bankruptcy by eliminating Germany as a competitor, Churchill opened his mind to Morgenthau’s ideas. “After all, the future of my people is at stake,” Churchill said, “and when I have to choose between my people and the German people, I am going to choose my people.”
After further discussion, both Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to sign an extraordinary memo which called for “converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character” by “eliminating the war making industries in the Ruhr and the Saar.” Morgenthau was thrilled. Invited to join the president for drinks in Roosevelt’s suite at the Citadel, he noted, “We haven’t had a talk like this since almost going back to the time when he was governor.” It was, Morgenthau recalled, “the high spot of my whole career in Government.”
But Morgenthau’s euphoria was short-lived. When news of the draconian plan leaked to the press, a loud outcry arose within Roosevelt’s Cabinet, and the idea quietly died. “I never heard my husband say that he had changed his attitude on this plan,” Eleanor later wrote. “I think the repercussions brought about by the press stories made him feel it was wise to abandon [it] at that time . . . .”
The conference turned next to Pacific strategy. Churchill opened the discussion by declaring that Britain now stood ready and willing to send its main fleet to join in the struggle against Japan. Though Admiral King was initially opposed to the idea, not wishing, in the last stages of the war, to surrender America’s exclusive jurisdiction over the area, Roosevelt accepted Churchill’s offer without hesitation, welcoming the British fleet “whenever and wherever possible.” American plans for the final blow against Japan envisaged an invasion of the Japanese homeland sometime in 1945, after Germany’s defeat.
For the after-dinner entertainment that evening, Roosevelt chose Woodrow Wilson, a motion-picture biography on the rise and fall of the twenty-eighth president. The film followed in detail Wilson’s harsh descent into illness, incapacitation, rejection, and death. It was a curious selection for Roosevelt to make, coming at a time when he was beset with worries about both his own health and his fate at the hands of the electorate. Only hours earlier, Roosevelt had talked with Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King about his chances for re-election in November, and King could see that he was really concerned. Churchill was so restless during the film that he walked out halfway through. He was worried enough about his friend; he did not need a historical reminder of presidential illness. Indeed, so concerned was Churchill with Roosevelt’s appearance at Quebec that he went to see Dr. McIntire. McIntire, as usual, assured Churchill that Roosevelt was fine. “With all my heart I hope so,” Churchill replied. “We cannot have anything happen to that man.” When the film ended, sometime after midnight, Roosevelt seemed depressed, Dr. Bruenn noted, and his blood pressure was elevated to 240/130.
When the conference was over, Churchill accompanied Roosevelt to Hyde Park for two days before returning to England. On arriving at the Big House, the prime minister was delighted to learn that Harry Hopkins, who had not been present at Quebec, was coming to lunch. Hopkins’ absence from the conference had troubled both Churchill and Mrs. Churchill. “He seems to have quite dropped out of the picture,” Mrs. Churchill had written her daughter from Quebec. “I found it sad and rather embarrassing. We cannot quite make out whether Harry’s old place in the President’s confidence is vacant, or whether Admiral [William] Leahy is gradually moulding into it.”
Churchill later recalled a curious incident at lunch. Hopkins arrived a few minutes late, and the president “did not even greet him.” Later that afternoon, Hopkins explained to Churchill his altered position. His marriage, his decision to move from the White House, and his own ill-health had induced a decline in the president’s favor. “You must know I am not what I was,” Hopkins admitted to Churchill. “He had tried to do too much at once,” Churchill later said. “Even his fullness of spirit broke under his variegated activities.”
“There was no open breach between them,” Hopkins’ biographer Robert Sherwood observed, “simply an admission that [Hopkins] was no longer physically fit to share the burdens of responsibility for the big decisions of the war.” But Hopkins had made remarkable comebacks before, and in the months ahead, he would rally his energies once more to re-establish himself as Roosevelt’s chief adviser.
Mrs. Churchill thoroughly enjoyed her days at Hyde Park, the picnics on the lawn, the good talk, the leisurely walks through the woods. This was the first time that she had met Anna. “She is a wonderful combination of yourself and the President,” she wrote Eleanor. “She charmed Winston and me with her gay and vivacious personality.”
If Mrs. Churchill flourished in the simple routine of Hyde Park, Eleanor was glad when the visit was over. “My time slips away,” she lamented to Joe Lash, explaining that she felt like “a glorified housekeeper” with a household that changed every hour. “These are the days when the resentment at the tyranny of people and things grows on me until if I were not a well-disciplined person I would go out and howl like a dog! The Churchills and party came at 11, Harry Hopkins at 12, the Duke of Windsor at 12:15. After lunch I dashed to the cottage and did one column, returned at 3:30, changed all the orders given at 12:30 and walked with Mrs. Churchill for an hour and a half ending up at Franklin’s cottage for tea, worked again 5-7:15, dashed home and had Henry and Elinor and [neighbors from Staatsburg] the Lytle Hulls for dinner. Now the mail is done and my spirit is calm and I can enjoy writing to you.”
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