Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  ER declined to chair the event since she was scheduled to be on a lecture tour of the West Coast in April, but she enlisted some of her closest friends to support the concert. Caroline O’Day and Isabella Greenway, both members of the committee, worked closely with Chapman and Ickes on all details. Her friends Leila and Gifford Pinchot, aware of Washington’s segregated restaurants and hotels, agreed to host Anderson and her party.*

  On 9 April 75,000 Americans attended Marian Anderson’s Freedom Concert, which was broadcast live across the country. The unprecedented, entirely integrated audience extended the length of the mall, from the base of the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument and beyond. Harold Ickes considered it “one of the most impressive affairs that I have ever attended.” Chapman and O’Day escorted Anderson onto the stage, and when Anderson “faced the enormous crowd,” Chapman said, “she was almost overcome.” She paused to focus upon all the newsreel equipment and the six microphones of the major radio networks. “I had a feeling,” she later reflected, “that a great wave of good will poured out from these people, almost engulfing me.”

  Ickes introduced Anderson, later considering his two-minute introduction “the best speech I have ever made”:

  In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free. . . .

  When God gave us the sun and the moon and the stars, He made no distinction of race, creed, or color. . . .

  Genius, like Justice, is blind. For Genius with the tip of her wings has touched this woman, who, if it had not been for . . . the great heart of Lincoln, would not be able to stand among us today a free individual in a free land. Genius draws no color line. She has endowed Marian Anderson with such a voice . . . a matter of exultant pride to any race.

  Anderson sang arias, classical favorites, and spirituals. She performed “America the Beautiful,” all verses. After her encore, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” she told the audience, “I am so overwhelmed. . . . I can’t tell you what you have done for me today. I thank you from the bottom of my heart again and again.” She then turned to her accompanist, Kosti Vehanen, who bowed and kissed her hand. Then the short white man and the tall black woman walked back toward the monument, arm in arm. The Times reported that Anderson’s devoted mother was present.

  That brief concert, which began at five p.m. and lasted less than an hour, has endured in the nation’s memory. The power of art and ethics had embraced, and the message was clear: concerned decent people would no longer ignore public insults to black Americans. The time to stand up and be counted had arrived. A long process had begun. The Freedom Concert was broadcast to millions of Americans, north and south. America had taken a first step toward respect.

  For all the joy and hope inspired by that event, Washington’s public spaces—its parks and playgrounds—remained segregated. While 200 black and white notables sat together in reserved seats on the platform at Lincoln’s feet, 75,000 Americans in their Easter finery stood together to hear Marian Anderson. To stand together was somehow acceptable to the segregated, and ongoing, norms of the capital.

  For ER, America’s future, and the future of the world, depended on how people responded to the cruelties of bigotry. Race and respect, the long struggle against discrimination, was moved to the forefront of her agenda. As early as 16 January 1939, she had agreed to present Anderson with the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal that July. She planned to have integrated talent to perform for the British king and queen during their June visit. She now announced that Marian Anderson “will sing for them at the White House.”

  • • •

  During her West Coast tour, ER had time to be in Seattle with her daughter Anna, who on 1 April had given birth to her third child, John Boettiger Jr. In an unusually introspective column, ER considered the psychological ordeal that precedes childbirth: “No matter how many times we have seen babies come safely into the world, we always think before the event of all the dreadful possibilities that surround all human ventures.” Once Anna was safely returned to her own room, and the baby was brought in for careful inspection, the sun returned to the world “as far as all the people who love Anna were concerned.” ER was especially pleased that the president was telephoned before the press found out about the birth.

  ER’s relief and delight stimulated her deepest thoughts about love:

  When you love people very much, isn’t it grand to be able to join in their happiness? Like everything else in the world, however, there is a price to pay for love, for the more happiness we derive from the existence and companionship of other human beings, the more vulnerable we are. . . . It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.

  The next day she wrote to Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, “Anna is doing very well, the baby is grand and life is quite serene out here!” On a personal note she confided that her many concerns about Anna’s troubled husband, John Boettiger, were lifted: Anna “is a grand person and what she has done for John is really remarkable. A really narrow person has broadened out beyond belief! He was always lovable even at his most bitter and cynical stage, but life with Anna has completely changed him.”

  Only two weeks later, on 18 April, tragedy struck at the heart of her family. ER’s nephew Daniel Stewart Roosevelt and his friend Bronson Harriman “Pete” Rumsey were killed when their airplane crashed in Mexico.* The plane belonged to Pete but had been piloted by Danny. Both boys had flying licenses. Danny’s father, ER’s brother Hall, flew to the border to bring their bodies home. For the first time in her relentless lecture career, ER canceled three speaking engagements to be with her brother during this unbearable tragedy, from which he never fully recovered.

  Hall was crushed by his son’s death and ER was staggered by it. She had admired Danny—the previous year he had accompanied his father on a trip to Europe to try to get planes to the Loyalist forces in Spain. U.S. ambassador to France William Bullitt, working to negotiate a French-German agreement, had stopped their courageous effort. The vicious blockade against aid to the Loyalists, imposed by England, France, and the United States, had ensured the triumph of the fascists, ER was sure: Madrid had fallen to them on 28 March. The final betrayal, only weeks before Danny’s death, had occurred on 3 April 1939, when the United States officially recognized fascist Spain. ER always referred to the U.S. role in Franco’s victory with shame and anger.

  On 9 February 1939, in recognition and thanks for her support for the Spanish Loyalist cause, the Spanish government had presented ER with a book of Goya’s nineteenth-century etchings taken from the painter’s original plates in Madrid.* Ignoring all objections, ER sent the etchings to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington for a public exhibition, which opened to great excitement. She also displayed them at the White House.

  Coincidentally, the day she left for Dedham for Danny’s funeral, the New York Times reported that Joseph Goebbels had attacked her for accepting “presents” from the “Red Spanish government” of Barcelona. ER treasured the prints, and as she stood beside her brother at her nephew’s burial, she surely pondered Goya’s images of death—the senseless random suffering of war, the cruel petty hatreds of tyrants, the rivers of blood, and the islands of love that made life bearable.

  Danny’s death seemed connected to so much loss, so much suffering—in Spain, in her own family, in the world. Surrounded by adverse publicity over the Goya prints, ER returned to Washington resolved to help restore democracy where it was lost and to strengthen it where it might still survive.

  Chapter Two

  “You Cannot Just Sit and Talk About It, You Have to Do Something”

  Since childhood, ER had accepted what she considered life’s primary lesson: joy is forever stalked by uncertainty and disappointment,
even tragedy. As she boarded the train home from her nephew’s funeral, her heart was filled with grief. Plunged in gloom for the fate of young people as the world returned to war, she recalled her tour of Europe twenty years before, when she had witnessed the result of the most bitter carnage, with millions dead and “every other woman in a black veil to her knees.” Everything she had hated about 1919—the tragedies of war, the brutalities of the Red Scare—seemed to be poisoning everything she most cared about now. The world seemed caught in a web of military madness, controlled by a shrieking lunatic who had no regard for life, for children, for the beauty of spring.

  On 14 April 1939, in an effort to avert war, which would certainly bring “common ruin,” FDR issued a public message to Hitler and Mussolini. Political, economic, and social problems, he insisted, could reasonably be negotiated “at the council table.” New trade agreements could relieve the world from fear and the fiscally “crushing burden of armaments,” so that all nations might “buy and sell on equal terms” and obtain raw materials and products essential to “peaceful economic life.” In exchange for such agreements, FDR sought an “assurance” that Hitler and Mussolini would not invade the “territory or possessions” of thirty-one independent nations in Europe and the Middle East.* He hoped the two dictators could adhere to this promise of “assured nonaggression” for “ten years at the least.”

  Mussolini scorned the message as the result of the weak president’s “infantile paralysis,” while Hitler responded with a blistering two-hour Reichstag rant. Hitler thundered that the United States had been the first to demonstrate contempt for treaty accords and the League of Nations. To resist “encirclement,” he now canceled the naval treaty with England and a 1934 pact with Poland in exchange for Polish territory to permit Germany’s pathway to East Prussia, “the Polish Corridor.” His speech left little doubt that war with Poland was imminent.

  Worldwide, mistrust and suspicion prevailed. U.S. diplomatic circles feared that Britain might form an alliance with Hitler and hand over interests in South America, while others feared that the United States would maintain its isolation and thereby doom antifascist European nations. Still others feared that Japan would move from Chinese to Soviet territories in Asia. And still others feared that Germany and the Soviet Union would ally, at everybody’s expense.

  The Soviet Union had been “ostentatiously excluded” from the 1938 Munich Conference. Nonetheless all winter and spring Foreign Minister Litvinov had intensified his efforts to forge a real alliance against Hitler that would include Britain, France, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and the Soviet Union. Litvinov, who was Jewish, was married to British literary scholar and writer Ivy Low Litvinov, who failed to accompany him to Washington because she was so busy with her own work.

  He found support from Harold Nicolson* and from Winston Churchill, but otherwise the response in England was tepid. Others expressed no interest at all. On 20 March, Romania agreed to give Germany “exclusive use” of over half its considerable oil production. Subsequently, King Carol confided to Hitler that he was “against Russia” and would never consent to Russian troop passage through Romania. Hungary, ethnically diverse and politically divided, feared above all a recurrence of its 1919 Communist revolution. Now led by fervent anti-Communist nationalist Admiral Miklós Horthy, Hungarians sought an independent road above the fray, with a preference for Hitler’s Germany. In April, Hungary issued its own anti-Jewish laws and soon joined Germany, Italy, and Japan in the Anti-Comintern Pact.

  ER approved of Litvinov’s call for a Grand Alliance against Hitler. In 1933, she had been delighted when the United States recognized the Soviet Union (in large part because of the good work of Esther Lape and her committee). She liked Litvinov personally and looked forward to meeting his independent wife. She had frequently spoken against appeasement and against all those who preferred to sacrifice Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Spain to Nazi-fascist brutality on the grounds that Hitler was allegedly the bulwark against Communism. The anti-Communist crusade had corrupted the Roman Catholic Church into supporting fascism, even in the United States, where Detroit’s “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin spewed the most hateful anti-Jewish bile every Sunday. More recently, Congressman Martin Dies (D-TX) protected Nazis while crusading against “un-Americans,” by which he meant liberals, ER, and her friends, all alleged Communists. The entire world was now at risk, and it seemed to ER unnecessary, if not insane.

  She was also puzzled by America’s refusal to acknowledge the agonies that Japanese violence inflicted on China. Hostilities between the two countries had broken out in July 1937. Japan and the Soviet Union, she understood, were in competition and conflict from Manchuria to Mongolia to the western Asian borderlands; the Soviet Union was aiding China as it had aided Spain. Was that the reason for America’s silence concerning China? she wondered. Was that why the U.S. failed to offer China any support or to oppose Japan?

  According to the U.S. diplomat Norman Davis, the State Department had “two schools of thought.” One believed Japan would conquer China, then move on to British, French, Dutch, and U.S. possessions in the Pacific—rendering war inevitable. The other believed China could not be conquered, and that Japan’s futile effort to do so would exhaust it and render it puny. In either case, Japan would be obliged “to trade with us . . . and we have no interests in the Far East that would justify war.” FDR told Davis that he agreed with the first precept. But there was a third consideration: just as appeasers, in the words of General Alan Brooke, had fantasized “a Nazi-Soviet war that would enable Britain to preside over an exhausted Europe,” certain U.S. diplomats fantasized a Russo-Japanese war that would benefit U.S. influence throughout Asia.

  In November 1937 the Brussels Conference on the Far East was convened to find a way to end the Japanese-Chinese conflict. For the last time Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union met to discuss the world situation. FDR explicitly instructed Norman Davis, the U.S. delegate to Brussels, to “do nothing that would entail American initiative to curb Japan.” Davis suggested that the United States suspend the Neutrality Act “to alarm Japan and hearten the Chinese,” but FDR refused. He wanted no binding agreement. In the end, the conference merely issued a weak appeal to China and Japan to cease fighting. Davis returned to Washington depressed and disgruntled.

  In the intervening two years, Japanese atrocities mounted, and the United States missed more opportunities for engagement. On 17 March 1938 Soviet foreign minister Litvinov appealed for a conference to discuss resistance to Germany and Japan. Washington ignored him. U.S. secretary of state Cordell Hull, who generally despised Japan, counseled against waging even economic warfare against it, arguing that it would harm U.S. business interests; Japan was a primary importer of U.S. cotton, steel, and oil.

  On 16 April 1939 Litvinov urged the Soviet Union, Britain, and France to form a three-power military alliance, but the allies hesitated. Then in May, Winston Churchill, long a committed anti-Communist, made a startling speech in Parliament, calling on His Majesty’s Government to accept “the full co-operation of Russia.” On 19 May, he gave another speech and qualified his earlier statement: “Without an effective Eastern front there can be no satisfactory defence of our interests in the West, and without Russia there can be no effective Eastern front.”

  But it was too late. The Jewish, pro-Western Litvinov had failed to achieve his goal of an anti-Hitler alliance. On 4 May Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had named Vyacheslav Molotov to replace him as Soviet foreign minister. It was the end of an era, and some believed it was the end of everything. As soon as Litvinov’s departure was announced, Harold Nicolson wrote in his journal, “The left-wing people are very upset.” Many believed that with Litvinov gone, Stalin was ready to “make a neutrality pact with Germany. I fear this terribly.”

  In this harrowing context, ER faced the possibility of renewed bloodshed and the bombing of densely populated cities across increasingl
y meaningless borders. Spain remained her moral equator. She loathed war, but her views were increasingly complicated. What could be done? What might she do? She was first lady of the United States, and her husband had just recognized Franco’s Spain. She set her mind on islands of hope for understanding and international amity in a sea of violence. The New York World’s Fair was to open on 30 April—perhaps it would inspire protest against the waste of humanity’s best creative impulses. And England’s attractive young royals, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, were to visit in June. Perhaps their visit would inspire public support for international efforts to derail fascism’s rolling thunder.

  She loved her brother Hall’s children and was proud of their achievements. Her niece and namesake earned her first public recognition as a costume and jewelry designer through the prism of Danny’s death. The New York Times reported on 22 April that “costumes and accessories fashioned from printed silk fabrics that represent the first efforts of Miss Eleanor Roosevelt” had been previewed at Arnold Constable, a leading Manhattan department store. “Some of the prints are patriotic and others futuristic, since Miss Roosevelt based her collection on a World of Tomorrow motif keyed to the World’s Fair themes.”

  ER’s gardens took her away from the world of wars, carnage, politics, and vested interests. She was proud of her spectacular plantings and each week sent fresh cut flowers from the White House to Hick for her city apartment and for her office at the World’s Fair, as well as to other special friends. When she considered the impending visit of Britain’s royals, she counted on William Reeves, her head gardener, to arrange a “profusion of beauty” and called upon her friends to send their favorite floral tributes. “England is a land of beautiful gardens and flowers,” she acknowledged, but they did not have the splendid “magnolia tree planted by Andrew Jackson,” whose astonishing blossoms would be “opened wide” for their visit.