She wanted to see public protests and organized community efforts. She wanted her husband to speak more bluntly to reactionaries in Congress and in his own party. But it was an election year, and FDR preferred his diplomatic approach, even as he warned: We will have a liberal democracy, or we will return to the Dark Ages.
She went across the country to defend the New Deal, and relentlessly agitated for greater support for those who were sliding deeper into financial crisis without work or adequate shelter. It was as if she no longer considered her own needs, suspending many of her own friendships and simple pleasures. One day after a lecture in Massachusetts, she and Tommy stopped in Connecticut for a flying visit of less than an hour with Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read. Tommy explained to Lape that the visit had necessarily been brief because “Thursday she spends all day with the South Americans!”
She was referring to the entourage of Nicaragua’s president, the dictator Anastasio Somoza, who arrived on 5 May. His controversial visits to Washington, New York (for the World’s Fair), and New Orleans were entirely financed by the U.S. government. American companies had long dominated Nicaragua’s economy—its banks, railroads, gold mines, mahogany forests, and plentiful stores of coffee and bananas.* FDR supported Somoza in the interests of the hemispheric alliance to resist Nazi incursions. FDR’s famous line “He is a son of bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch” became an even more urgent aspect of U.S. policy as Hitler’s emissaries swarmed Latin America and trade with Germany and Japan increased.
On the morning of 5 May, in Washington’s spring heat, ER watched U.S. troops pay homage to the Franco of Nicaragua. A dutiful first lady, she accepted a medal from him and stood beside him during the military parade and reception. In a published photo of her, wearing a white fox around her neck, her expression of distress and distaste recalls her cold “Griselda moods” of silent rage. She hewed to her obligations as first lady, even when her personal beliefs were at odds with administration policy.
The Nicaraguan dictator left the capital with a $2.5 million loan from the Export-Import Bank and promises of more. There is no record of what FDR requested in return from the ruler of the most underpopulated nation in the western hemisphere, who had specifically refused to accept refugees (especially merchants and intellectuals) at the 1938 Evian Conference. On his return to Managua, Somoza renamed the main street “Avenida Roosevelt,” removed a “composite picture of himself and Adolf Hitler” from his office wall, and replaced it with “four portraits of FDR.” Clearly U.S. support countermanded German inroads.
• • •
All spring ER continued to be dismayed by FDR’s failure to respond to the mounting refugee crises. On 1 April she wired him from Seattle, where she was visiting their daughter Anna: “Just received wire signed Einstein, Dorothy Thompson, etc., about important leaders trapped in Madrid. Are you or State Department doing anything? All well here. Love.” FDR telegraphed back the same day from Warm Springs, “State Department doing everything possible in Spain. . . . Much love to all six of you.”
ER knew better. The State Department was doing nothing for refugees. In February, her old friend Nan Wood Honeyman, former member of Congress from Oregon, had appealed to her on behalf of a constituent for advice about where to turn for help with Jewish refugees. “The truth is,” ER had replied, “most of the work being done for refugees is being done through the Quakers and the Jewish Refugee Committee.” She suggested that Honeyman’s constituent contact Clarence Pickett of the AFSC. Her own work for refugees was done through those groups, notably the current campaign to provide sanctuary for children.
Meanwhile the House passed a bill that would actually require the “detention of certain aliens” pending their deportation. Introduced by Congressman Sam Hobbs (D-AL), it targeted refugees without papers—notably those from countries recently absorbed into Hitler’s Reich. Unable to obtain passports, they were now suspect and were to be detained for unspecified duration, without charges or hearings, despite all due process requirements of American law and custom.
ER’s closest friends and allies spoke vigorously against the bill, which they believed was unconstitutional, un-American, and totalitarian. In the debate on the House floor, Caroline O’Day invoked Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, in which “the United States, the greatest democracy in the world, became a totalitarian state, not overnight or all of a sudden . . . but because its citizens neglected to guard their civil liberties. Through carelessness or indifference they relinquished those liberties one by one until such time as a ruthless minority seized the reins of government and established a totalitarian state.” O’Day compared the current political situation to Lewis’s fictional state, and argued:
It can happen here. And if this bill becomes law we will have taken the first step. . . . [This bill] is a negation of every idea and policy and principle that our country holds most dear. I can imagine with what satisfaction Hitler will learn that his emissaries in this country have so influenced Congress that it is following his example and setting up detention or concentration camps during peacetime. . . . They are called detention camps, but Hitler knows as well as anyone how swiftly a detention camp can be transformed into a concentration camp. This bill is a vicious and un-American bill and should be defeated.
Supporters of the bill argued that it specifically targeted Communists, anarchists, and immoral agitators. “The American people do not want these . . . promoters of communistic philosophy creating disturbances and trouble in this country. Our people want to send them back from whence they came.”
Despite opposition by congressional leaders Emanuel Celler, Jerry Voorhis, and Louis Ludlow, the House passed the Hobbs bill on 5 May 1939, by 289 to 61, with 80 not voting.*
• • •
FDR was concerned about the plight of refugees, but he simply had too little congressional support even for his favorite projects. When he sought, for example, to make the CCC a permanent agency, Congress voted against it. He wanted to put things off until after the 1940 elections, which promised a more liberal outcome. In the meantime he sought alternative solutions for the refugee crises. ER had letters from people who had suggested underpopulated states, like Montana and Utah, as potential havens. When she sought her friend Bernard Baruch’s advice, he was uninterested and wanted to avoid exacerbating the “Jewish problem” in America.
When Baruch commended FDR for his 14 April letter to Hitler, the president cabled his gratitude, and noted, “The big thing we talked about is by no means dead. It will revive if Hitler and Mussolini do not slam the door in our faces!”
The “big thing” was Baruch’s plan for the creation of a United States of Africa for all refugees—for people “of all faiths and nationalities whom Hitler had marked for destruction.” He envisioned locating the colony in the Belgian Congo, Portuguese Angola, Kenya, and Tanganyika. Baruch saw it as a democratic and diverse alternative to a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine, which he feared could only become an embattled ghetto. Baruch intended to raise $500 million to create the sanctuary. He imagined that it would become a British protectorate and thereby would obtain British support. He enlisted Herbert Hoover to accept “leadership” for the engineering and technical aspects of the project, and he approached FDR, who “sketched a map of Africa . . . outlining the temperate, largely unpopulated areas where such a scheme might be put into effect.” Evidently FDR also sent emissaries to discuss the project with Hitler. But King Leopold had rebuffed the idea “because the land belonged to the natives.” “You see,” Baruch told the king, “no one wants them.”
Unlike Baruch, FDR believed that Britain’s promise to Jews regarding Palestine, initiated by the 1917 Balfour Declaration, represented a hopeful strategy for escape and haven.* He was dismayed in May 1933 when the United Kingdom issued a new White Paper that asserted that Palestine should not “be converted into a Jewish state against the will of the Arab population” and tha
t severely restricted Jewish immigration to 75,000 over the next five years, never to exceed one-third of the total population. On 17 May FDR wrote to Cordell Hull that this policy change betrayed England’s pledge to create a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” Hull agreed—the United States would not officially recognize this shift in British policy.
Frustrated by a lack of progress on issues that concerned her deeply, ER confided to Hick on 20 May, “I have been admonishing FDR like a Dutch Uncle lately and he’s been good about it but I can’t bear to have Congress go home with nothing done!” She was also frankly disappointed by his recent speech regarding the arms embargo: “It doesn’t seem much good to me, same old thing and no real suggestions for what should be done and these are things that must be done. Well, it is easy to criticize when you don’t carry the responsibility.”
• • •
That was the strained political dimension in which the White House prepared for the unprecedented visit of Britain’s King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. In the battle against isolationist sentiment, the first lady increasingly considered her primary public relations activity to be hosting ceremonial receptions for heads of state who visited America for alliance and support. She and FDR believed that their honored guests could personify and humanize Europe’s tragedy, perhaps inducing isolationists to join their defense team.
No diplomatic visit received as much thoughtful attention to detail, time, and effort as did the heralded journey by Britain’s royals. With their own quest for alliances against fascism paramount, the king and queen had planned to journey to Canada to encourage the support of “every citizen in their dominions.” FDR invited them to the United States because he believed, as ER put it, “we all might soon be engaged in a life and death struggle, in which Great Britain would be our first line of defense.” For all the isolationist feeling in the United States, Americans shared a bond of language, custom, and ideals with the British. Both ER and FDR hoped the royal visit would spark concern among Americans and even stir a sense of unity with the British—especially among those stubbornly removed from the international situation.
When ER returned from her southern lecture tour on 31 May, she walked into a maelstrom of tension between FDR and his mother over room arrangements for the royals. Sara had been a guest of King George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace. Now their son was to visit her son, and the first mother wanted lofty standards fully observed. But FDR rejected stiff formalities. He behaved, ER later recalled, “as though we were simply going to have two very nice young people to stay with us. I think he gave some of the protocol people, both in the State Department and in the entourage of the king and queen, some very difficult moments.” The president and his mother had argued for days, until FDR took to his bed. ER wrote to Anna, “Pa was annoyed every minute and developed sinus Tuesday & went to bed with a temperature of 101/2 tonight. . . . I say a little prayer to live through the 11th,” when the royal visit was scheduled to end.
For her part, ER was determined to create an environment of warm gracious comfort and to fulfill her mother-in-law’s formal expectations. She consulted with the State Department’s chief of protocol, her knowledgeable social secretary Edith Helm, and her girlhood friend Elisabeth Cameron Lindsay, now Lady Lindsay, wife of the British ambassador Sir Ronald Lindsay. Daughter of Henry Adams’s great friend Elizabeth Cameron, Lady Lindsay had been a member of ER’s flamboyant biweekly “air our minds” luncheons during FDR’s first term. She was trustworthy, had a grand “sense of humor,” was “keen” and occasionally wicked. We “looked at things from more or less the same point of view,” ER wrote.
Some people believed SDR and her son disagreed about ER’s plans for the White House entertainment, but the family agreed on issues of race and justice—civility, opportunity, dignity for all—and that “we should give the king and queen something they would not have at home.” ER made it clear that Marian Anderson would indeed “be presented to the King and Queen of England.” That meant they would shake hands, and perhaps dine together. It was all unprecedented and, for some reporters at her regular press conference, “shocking.” The program would also feature baritone Lawrence Tibbett and the popular singer Kate Smith. Alan Lomax would perform western cowboy songs. There would also be a “North Carolina Negro chorus” of thirty men and women from the Federal Music Project; the Coon Creek Girls, a “white non-WPA” group from the Kentucky mountains; several square dance and folk dance groups.
ER also wanted to emphasize to the press that there were more important issues to discuss than “etiquette” and new mattresses for the White House. The real issue before America, and the world, she declared, was the survival of democracy, which depended on “freedom and security.” Freedom involved opportunity and work, education and gainful employment. Security involved the quest for peace. War now threatened democracy’s very survival.
That was the urgency behind the royal visit, as well as ER’s commitment to create positive newsworthy events that would transform public opinion. The press and most popular magazines anticipated the royal visit for weeks. ER appeared on the cover of Life magazine, as the “Queen’s Hostess.” The cover article featured the royal stay at Hyde Park, with extraordinary photographs by Margaret Bourke-White. Every room the royals might enter was accounted for and assessed: “Hyde Park is no castle but it is one of America’s most charming homes. . . . It is an old shoe of a place—worn, scuffed and scratched, polished into shape. . . . It is most emphatically American because its owner cared nothing about having a fancy house to show off and a great deal about a good house to live in.” ER was pleased that FDR insisted no changes would be made: the king and queen would see Hyde Park as it always was. They would enter a hall that featured prints of American victory over “British men of war” during the naval battles of 1812.
Despite her harried schedule, ER had agreed to an extraordinary interview and portrait session with S. J. Woolf of the New York Times. Woolf was treated to the fullness of one ER White House afternoon. ER gave Woolf only one hour to sketch her portrait and less than thirty minutes for questions. At three-thirty Tommy arrived to take dictation for ER’s column, while Woolf sketched. She allowed him to sit in as she dictated her column to Tommy. The result was the deepest glimpse into the heart of the first lady published to date. He had intended to focus on the royal visit but was so impressed by ER’s hectic life and contagious enthusiasm that he celebrated her “energy” instead. “All formality was forgotten,” Woolf wrote, “as this tall, lithe woman with a gracious smile entered . . . with [her] air of naturalness and hospitality which converted a cold public building into a home.”
ER’s “astonishing energy and absorbing curiosity,” Woolf learned, were fueled by her love for people. Her work satisfied her, helping people pleased her, and she never worried about making mistakes. She credited her splendid staff for doing much of the work for which she was complimented. She received, for example, 90,000 to 300,000 letters a year—her secretary of seventeen years, Tommy Thompson, and a team of assistants were responsible for sorting her mail. ER was particularly interested in reading critical letters, many of which taught her things she needed to know, and letters that appealed for help, most of which were sincere.
ER was moved by the story of a very poor young girl with a spinal injury, for whom she arranged hospital care. ER became close to the girl and her family. She was cured and now “is happily married living a normal life.”* The encounter was a perfect illustration of her belief that communal prosperity was fully realized when disadvantaged individuals triumphed: “Every time some one rises above what appears to be an insurmountable difficulty and wins out I feel that we all ought to profit by it. If they can win, we can all win.”
That, ER noted, was the message of Arthurdale. In that small West Virginia community, “people have the opportunity to make homes and livings for themselves.” Although government support for the community continue
d to be criticized as wasteful and foolish, ER asserted that every penny was well spent “if it brings some happiness to those who need it, some security where before the future held nothing but terror.”
At four o’clock, ER rushed out to change into a “pink afternoon gown” to greet three hundred waiting people. Tommy confided to Woolf that in all her years with ER, “she was always the same, never ruffled, never angry, always understanding.” Then ER returned to finish dictating her column. Then another change, another reception, this time for four hundred people. Woolf completed his drawing and departed—refreshed and energized.
• • •
The day the royals left for North America, 8 May 1939, the radio press dispatches FDR received dramatically detailed the urgency of fortifying Anglo-American alliance:
Milan: Germany and Italy “converted the Rome-Berlin Axis into an outright military alliance.”
Moscow: Speculation was reported “on the possibilities of German-Soviet friendship resulting from the resignation of Maxim Litvinov.”
Madrid: “A flotilla of German warships” cruised Spain’s coast “in honor of general Francisco Franco and the Fuehrer Adolf Hitler to mark the victory of the nationalists in the civil war.”
Berlin: Germany asserted the Italo-German military alliance “is a destroying blow to an aggressive encirclement policy. . . . Statements [about the pact] were coupled with a blunt warning to Poland that she must shoulder full blame for all that is coming.”
London: The Archbishop of Canterbury appealed to Pope Pius XII “to assume leadership of a united front of ‘all Christendom’ to work for world peace.”
Capetown, South Africa: The German South African Party—“comprised of naturalized German ex-servicemen”—opposed Adolf Hitler, rejected Nazi philosophy, asked “South Africans to remember the pre-Hitler Germany where ‘right and justice were the supreme law.’”
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3 Page 9