It is unclear what ER learned on her trip to New York, or what letter she received in the mail, or who arrived to change her mood. But on her return to Hyde Park, her tone of melancholy was replaced with a new verve and more familiar bold purpose. Perhaps it was that her brother was momentarily in a good situation.
Or perhaps she had had news of her traveling family, and her mother-in-law’s doings in London and Paris. That August SDR and her great friend Grace Vanderbilt were being escorted around London by Grace’s son Cornelius “Neil” Vanderbilt Jr., who provided ER with the fullest details.
“Mother and Mrs. Roosevelt beat me to London by about six hours,” he wrote. They were much excited because they were to have tea with Grace’s “dear friend, Queen Mary.” Their “thirty or forty years” of correspondence had even survived Grace’s nine-page letter urging the queen not to be so harsh and unfair to the Duke of Windsor. Now Neil escorted them to “Buck House,” as his mother called it—and observed that the gatekeepers and guards recognized her as she presented “the mother of my President.”
“That night at dinner, Mother and Mrs. Roosevelt regaled me with an account of their afternoon. They were so proud of themselves and so very happy and gay; they had a sense of accomplishment.” They were convinced they had forestalled the coming of “another world war.” Neil himself predicted war was imminent, “certainly not later than this fall, but perhaps as soon as next week.” But both women abhorred war and thought themselves supremely influential: “We went over to talk to Queen Mary and tell her that we three people were not going to permit another world war to come to civilization.
“And Mother truly believed that because Mrs. Roosevelt, the mother of the President of the United States, and Queen Mary, the mother of the King of England, and she herself, a powerful person in financial circles” on two continents, had gotten together and agreed, the war would be prevented. They were perhaps among the last to insist that relations were more tidy, and everything was safer so long as the cousins ruled the world.
For the next several days, as Neil took them about London, they saw dramatic preparations for war everywhere. The streets were “torn up,” electric wiring for new communications was being strung, trenches were being dug, anti-aircraft installations were being created. It reminded Neil of the war preparations he had seen in Danzig weeks before. ER, upon receiving Neil’s news, was filled with dread.
After Grace returned to the United States, SDR, now accompanied by her grandchildren John and Anne, journeyed on to Paris, where Neil met up with her again at Ambassador William Bullitt’s Chantilly residence. “The President’s mother, is in grand form,” reported Bullitt’s executive secretary, Carmel Offie.
At dinner Bullitt introduced SDR and explained that the United States under her son was not a monarchy, a dictatorship, or a socialist state—it was a “matriarchy under her.” Dinner was interrupted by ominous international phone calls, and a surprise visit from French president Albert Lebrun: “I have come to tell the United States, and the very charming mother of the President, that the French Republic is mobilizing. . . . Good night my friends, and may God bless us all.”
After a round of liqueurs and brandy in the library, Bullitt drove his guests to a village fair in Chantilly. Beyond the sideshows and carousels, an elaborate shooting range had been set up for serious competition. SDR picked up a rifle, and in “no time at all, she shot the bowls off the pipes, hit many of the little ducks and other moving animals, and before we knew what happened, she won the first prize”—an elaborate gingerbread pig, to be personalized with her name. The entire party spelled the name slowly for the attendant, who replied, “Oh, comme le président.” Yes, they acknowledged. Asked what she would do with her prize, SDR said she intended to give it to her son. Bullitt asked, “Do you think he will understand?” “Yes, my son understands everything his mother does, although he often does not agree with her. . . . You know, when Frank was a little boy he was pretty much of a piggy-wiggy, and sometimes he still is.”
Chapter Five
“If They Perish, We Perish Sooner or Later”
In August 1939 anyone privileged to read diplomatic dispatches, listen to shortwave radio, or garner clear signals from abroad in any other way, knew that war was imminent. Although it is uncertain what messages ER received while her husband was on the cruiser Tuscaloosa, fishing for salmon off the Newfoundland coast, she was aware that momentous events were under way. Congress was in recess, Parliament had adjourned “angry and anxious,” and last-minute efforts to forestall Danzig’s absorption by Germany failed.
For years, Russia had appealed to Western countries to form a united front against Hitler. Maxim Litvinov had long tried to achieve such an alliance, and his successor as Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, who was married to a Jewish woman, had continued that quest. Working together in an alliance, Russia, England, France, and Czechoslovakia—with its vast Skoda works, and its military and chemical industries—could have defeated the fascists and prevented war. But British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had allowed Russian negotiations to languish. Worse, he had sent to Moscow low-level negotiators without proper credentials and instructed them to move slowly, vaguely. They were discourteous.
Stalin was insulted, as he was meant to be. On 15 August Molotov announced that Stalin believed that Britain actually sought war in the East, from Poland to Russia, and that Chamberlain preferred to see the Soviet Union crushed. The Soviet leadership no longer had any reason to pursue an alliance with Britain against Hitler.
Instead, Stalin now sought an economic agreement and nonaggression pact with Germany itself. Hitler, ecstatic, responded immediately. On 17 August a Russo-German trade agreement was signed, and by 19 August a nonaggression pact was drafted. German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop traveled to Moscow, and on 23 August he and Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact. By its terms, Hitler and Stalin divided up the Baltic States—Lithuania would be in Germany’s sphere of influence, while Latvia, Estonia, and Finland were in the Soviet sphere—and they agreed to partition Poland.
When the pact was publicly announced on 24 August, it stunned the world. Anglo-American leaders cut their vacations short. “All talk of appeasement is now stilled,” Harold Nicolson wrote. For Communists like the Paris-based Russian journalist Ilya Ehrenburg, the pact, a treaty of “friendship cemented with blood,” was “blasphemy.” It was literally sickening—he took to his bed and could not eat regularly for eight months.
Churchill—who wondered which of the two enemies, Hitler or Stalin, “loathed [the pact] most”—returned to London. He had been in France touring the defenses along the Maginot Line with grave misgivings; he found France’s “defense” line to be illusionary, offering no protection, since Germany was on the march in every direction.
FDR cut short his Newfoundland fishing cruise. Jettisoning his plan to sail to Annapolis, on the morning of 24 August he anchored at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, from where he left at once for Washington by special train. Cordell Hull, having returned from a vacation in Virginia, met the president at the dock. The president appeared “grim and preoccupied,” the New York Times reported, as he debarked to make his “dramatic dash back to the capital.”
The details of the Nazi-Soviet Pact were still secret, but during a series of urgent meetings that week FDR and his cabinet correctly surmised them. The pact “probably means a partition of Poland,” Ickes wrote in his diary, and the Soviet Union “will not have to worry about the Ukraine, and her annexation of Bessarabia.” Germany would likely take over Romania and Hungary. Yugoslavia “will either fall to Italy or be divided.” The Balkans would remain “buffer states between Germany and Russia but more . . . under Russian influence.” In sum, the pact undid the geographic changes made between the Baltic and the Black Sea by the Treaty of Versailles. Germany would then turn to the West, and the war would affect the world on every continent. It was “terrible” on ev
ery level. Ickes, like Churchill, did not blame Russia for the disaster. Rather, “Chamberlain alone is to blame,” he said.
The discussions at cabinet meetings were wide-ranging. FDR specifically rejected any settlement that would be reminiscent of the Munich Agreement, which had devoured Czechoslovakia’s national independence and integrity. Unlike Czechoslovakia, Poland would not be sacrificed to Nazi aggression: “Parliament has been recalled,” noted FDR, “and war powers granted. . . . Chamberlain’s stiffer attitude is resulting in cheers when he appears on the street and soldiers in uniform are also being cheered.”
After the first day of meetings with his top advisers, including Hull, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, and Assistant Secretary of War Louis Johnson, FDR acted, noted the Times, “under the greatest urgency and in the belief that war was merely a matter of hours, unless some extraordinary effort was made to avoid it.” He “dispatched three appeals for the preservation of world peace,” addressed to Hitler, Poland’s president Ignacy Mościcki, and Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III, urging each to “accord complete respect to the independence and territorial integrity of the other.” In April he had sought a pledge of territorial integrity from Hitler and Mussolini, he recalled, to be followed by a “conference of world powers on disarmament and economic problems.” Now, he insisted, if there were no settlement, wanton aggression would result; brutal “efforts by the strong to dominate the weak” would lead only to endless war.
France and Poland had mobilized, and German troops were on the march from East Prussia and the Slovakian border. FDR instructed the War and Navy departments “to raise no question” regarding the shipment of planes and matériel to be delivered to England and France “on pending orders.”
FDR had warned Stalin that Hitler would turn on the Soviet Union eventually, but his warning went unheeded and “meant nothing in the context” of FDR’s explicit rejection of all responsibility up to that point. For months, the U.S. ambassadorship to Moscow had been vacant. Lawrence Steinhardt was appointed in March 1939, but he did not arrive in Moscow until August. By then it was too late—Stalin had already embarked upon the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
Stalin’s pact with Hitler forestalled not only a Nazi attack on Russia but also a Russian war with Japan. Japan had been moving along the Siberian border, specifically encroaching beyond Manchuria through Outer Mongolia. Now Japan, aware that its 1936 Berlin-Tokyo Anti-Comintern Pact had been trumped by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, turned in momentary panic to FDR for an agreement “to go into Siberia and take it away from the Russians.” This strange appeal to block Russia’s flow of supplies to China and “stabilize” Asia was quickly withdrawn after late August conversations between Hull and Japan’s ambassador to Washington revealed that the U.S. government actually intended to increase its aid to China. Indeed, by summer’s end FDR instructed Henry Morgenthau “to do everything we can that we can get away with” to help China repel Japan.
ER was pleased by FDR’s decision. She detested most of her husband’s State Department and deplored his policies of inaction. She never doubted the essential connectedness of all nations and all peoples, and had consistently campaigned for collective security, for a united front against fascism. She considered Hull spineless and useless as each outrage by Hitler and Mussolini unfolded; she particularly disliked Joseph Grew, FDR’s Groton and Harvard chum, who rejected economic pressures against Japan and equated sanctions with acts of war. In This Troubled World, her 1938 book, she had been critical of FDR’s failure to block German and Japanese trade. But if she regarded her husband’s inaction impatiently, she appreciated his sincere, patient commitment to the democratic process.
Above all, FDR was concerned about the forty thousand Americans still abroad—including his eighty-four-year-old mother, his youngest son, John, and his daughter-in-law Anne. They were not expected to sail until 1 September, but unknown to him, they had booked immediate passage out of Paris and were already aboard the George Washington. SDR and her grandchildren had departed right away “in order not unnecessarily to add to my son’s worries.” She added, “I have every faith that my son will do everything he can to save peace for the sake of liberty and democracy.”
ER was vastly relieved that her mother-in-law and children were homeward bound, but she worried about SDR’s ninety-year-old sister Dora Delano Forbes, “who stays on in Paris with absolute calm.” ER had deep respect for Aunt Dora, who “is so interested in everything going on in the world. I know it is not indifference which makes her calmly stay on in her Paris home.” During the first war Aunt Dora had taken ER to a Paris hospital to bring the wounded “comforts and pleasures.” ER was always impressed by her large and generous heart, but the new war was escalating at such a fast pace, ER worried that her aunt might not fully appreciate the dangers.
ER did not refer immediately to the shocking Nazi-Soviet Pact but expressed revulsion that “one man may decide to plunge Europe into war. . . . Every citizen in a democracy [must be appalled] that this important decision rests with one man.” She absolutely resolved to continue her work, even though “the newspapers these days are most depressing to read. I hardly dare think of the implications both for Europe and for ourselves of the last few days’ occurrences.”
In times of crisis and war, she knew that her job was to bang the drums, rattle the pots, and help develop the needed climate for change. To do so, she relied on her established network of women activists and increasingly on the younger people associated with the National Youth Administration (NYA) and the American Youth Congress (AYC). She was pleased, as summer ended, to spend time with “quite a number of young people these past few days,” notably NYA administrators Aubrey Williams and Mark McCloskey and their families. And when Senator Robert Wagner, South African writer Sarah Gertrude Millin, and Commander Flanagan visited, she took them for a tour of Dutchess County’s NYA projects: the Hudson River State Hospital in Poughkeepsie, which trained young workers for jobs in health care; an abandoned trade school transformed into an exciting NYA program for carpentry and wooden crafts; and a work center in Newburgh, where girls studied home economics and treated the visitors to an “excellent lunch.” At the trail museum in Bear Mountain Park, many youngsters were performing splendid services. Every program they visited boasted many graduates who had gone on to real and rewarding jobs.
Savoring life’s natural course even amid tensions, ER ended her column of 25 August with a reflective rhapsody:
I sank into bed last night with a feeling of great luxury. The city had been hot and not very attractive, so [to] lie with the moon shining down on my porch and find two blankets a pleasant covering, seemed good beyond measure. Our purple loose-strife is almost gone, but it is fading very beautifully, giving the green grass across our little pond a lovely rosy tinge. We humans should take lessons from nature and fade as gracefully. Perhaps we cling too much to the years of full bloom. If you fade gracefully, you may be just as attractive. Our loose-strife certainly is.
On Friday, she confessed that she had created something of a scene when she asked her husband when he would return to Hyde Park:
I talked to the President in Washington last night and, I suppose, like all women who like to keep the daily happenings on as even a keel as possible, I casually inquired the hour of his arrival Monday night, only to be told firmly that . . . arrivals and departures are of no importance now. In fact, nothing individual counts, perhaps the fate of civilization hangs in the balance. What does it matter whether we eat or sleep or do any of the things which we thought important yesterday? My heart sank, for that was the old 1914 psychology. It is rather horrible to have a past experience of this kind to check against the present.
She applauded her husband’s work, however:
Both the Pope and the President have issued pleas in the attempt to preserve European peace. Negotiation, mediation or arbitration are just words, but any one of them if put into practice now by people who
really want to keep peace, might mean life instead of death. . . . It is not only the young men whom we need to consider, for when the first airplane flies over a foreign country and drops its bombs, then all women, children and men are in equal danger.
For almost a week, daily news of war flooded every radio, every newspaper. Letters detailed war preparations across Europe. Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst wrote her husband, Harold Nicolson, in London while waiting for Parliament to act:
What ghastly hours. If only you were not in London. It makes me physically sick to think of air-raids. I was rung up in the middle of my luncheon and asked if the Buick would take an eight-foot stretcher or “only sitting-cases and corpses.” I feel sick with apprehension, but I find that I get braver as the day goes on, a curious psychological working which I wish I could analyse.
On 30 August, ER described the gloom and dread of each suspenseful morning:
I feel that every day that bombs do not actually burst and guns go off, we have gained an advantage. . . . One trembles to think of the number of human beings who stand opposite each other armed to the teeth. . . .
Everyone’s ear is glued to the radio. . . . I feel sorry for the German people, waiting for hours while their fate is being decided upon by one man. They are no more anxious for war, I am sure, than the people of Poland.
ER’s conviction that the people of Germany opposed war was influenced by the stunning radio broadcasts out of Berlin and London by William Shirer and Edward R. Murrow, two journalists she particularly admired. For much of August, Shirer reported on the “lies and invented incidents” that Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, inserted into broadsides and newspapers throughout Poland and Germany. Goebbels, the “master of the twisted word,” had created a new level of propaganda: Poland wanted war, it was reported; Poland butchered German families; Poland was a land of maniacs and monsters. People were either convinced or confused, while others decided that nothing was as it was reported.
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