ER was blunt: This was not solely about what the Jews had done. If they “always remain a nation within a nation,” Christians needed to accept their role in keeping them apart, then criticizing them if they become “too ostentatiously patriotic” in their efforts to assimilate as nationals. “The blame it seems to me cannot be entirely shrugged off the shoulders of the Gentile.” Perhaps “the Jewish people haven’t scattered themselves sufficiently through a wide area where they could be less concentrated in a racial group.” Perhaps they had not sufficiently diversified “their occupations,” and were too concentrated “in certain professions which leads inevitably to resentment.” But why should this resentment lead to “hate and persecution”? Was it, ER wondered, because of a “secret fear that the Jewish people are stronger or more able”? She reluctantly concluded that while the Jewish people might
be in part responsible for the present situation, they are not as responsible as the other races who need to examine themselves and grapple with their own fears. I think we, and by we I mean the people of Europe as well as the people of the United States, have pushed the Jewish race into Zionism and Palestine, and into their nationalistic attitude. Having that great responsibility upon us, I think it lies with us to free ourselves of our fears. . . .
Suppose that the people of a given state decided that one of their cities had become [dominated] by politicians of one racial group [and represented therefore a government of another country and were] a menace to the state. Would we go forth and slay the foreign citizens? By so doing it seems to me that we would arouse the compatriots living in other countries or in other parts of our own country to defend their racial brethren. . . . A little imagination would scatter and change this population without resorting to tyranny.
ER’s discussion of what Gentiles feared about the Jews involved all the stereotypes of the moment. But her essay was meant to warn against stereotypes and violent prejudice. ER concluded:
If tyranny and fear triumph in us we will bring out in the persecuted foreigner, greed and cunning and egotism for self-protection, and we are increasing the emphasis on religious and racial hatred.
In view of what is confronting us, the Jew is almost powerless today. The future depends entirely on the course the Gentiles choose to pursue. It can be cooperative, mutual assistance, gradual slow assimilation with justice and fair-mindedness towards all the racial groups living together in different countries—or it can be injustice, hatred and death.
It looks to me as though the future of the Jews were tied up as it has always been with the future of all the races of the world. If they perish, we perish sooner or later.
ER’s personal commitment to her Jewish friends and her commitment to end bigotry evolved slowly but were absolute. On 9 September Elinor Morgenthau was to arrive in New York from Europe, with her children, Henry (twenty-two) and Joan (sixteen), aboard a Norwegian steamer. ER drove to be at the dock to meet her: “This will be a happy day of reunion for them and I shall certainly be glad to have all these dear friends safely home.”
ER was probably thinking of the recent sinking of the Athenia, a Canadian vessel carrying fourteen hundred passengers to North America. On 3 September a German U-boat had torpedoed it off the coast of Scotland, and 112 lives had been lost. “We awoke,” ER wrote, “to the news of the tragedy. . . . We must all try to remain calm. . . . I shall be thankful when all of my family and friends are safely back in this country.” ER’s primary concerns were for Aunt Tissie in Scotland, Uncle David Gray in Dublin, and Aunt Dora in Paris. She was relieved to learn that the Morgenthaus’ voyage across the war-infested Atlantic had been stalled only once, by a British ship.
During the first months of the war, ER concentrated on issues of bigotry and rescue. With Esther Lape and Elisabeth Read, she reconsidered what was ultimately needed to end the scourge of war. Her allies in the World Court fight and great guides in the political realm had spent hours together discussing how to reorganize the world “to plan a more permanent way of peace.” Lape and Read remained ER’s most intimate confidantes as the world around them plunged into bitter disarray. That week ER and Tommy had “the most beautiful drive over to Westbrook, Conn.” Autumnal colors heightened the spectacular journey. But the enchantment of the afternoon involved their earnest, galvanizing conversation. They agreed, above all, not to give in to a defeatist war mentality concerning domestic issues: the goal was to “continue our own recovery . . . and still be of use to the people of the world.”
Her friends’ way of life appealed to ER, and she devoted a column to describing their sanctuary.
We cooked our lunch and ate it in the woods overlooking the marshes which run in front of the Sound. . . . A solitary figure could be seen poling a flat bottomed boat along the channels which run through the salt meadows. In front of us was a most beautiful old oak tree which had withstood the ravages of last year’s storm. . . . The sun flickered through and it was a most peaceful and restful interlude. When we walked up through the woods after lunch to the higher ground, we had a view of the blue water with the dancing sunlight on it. . . . We will look back happily on one of our last days of summer freedom.
She devoted a subsequent column to their conversation. During the last war, she said, we lost “sight of domestic problems, [and shoved] aside things which were really vitally important to peace, because we were at war. We must not do that again.” Courage and foresight were essential “to plan a more permanent way of peace.” People would dismiss this intent as an impossible “pipe dream,” ER asserted. “Well, I for one, want to try and I hope there will be many other people who feel as I do.” She hoped an international group would begin to meet now to plan continuously “for future peace.” She wanted internationalist thinkers and young people determined to “aid humanity and civil populations everywhere,” to meet and build an “awareness of what war means to the lives of all people” and consider the ways that this “world shall be organized for peace in the future.”
On Friday night, 9 September, FDR arrived in Hyde Park for the last weekend of summer and his mother’s birthday. ER had returned from her travels and chores “in time to greet the President. . . . In spite of the fact that he needed badly to make up sleep, we talked until late that night.” On Sunday evening, ER closed the cottage at Val-Kill for the season. Alone, she wound up “all the little tag ends which need to be done in a house at the end of the season. . . . We boarded the train at about 11:00 o’clock and we were all sorry to leave the country.” She returned to a vigorous lecture schedule, which would take her south, and many immediate meetings to prepare Democratic women for the upcoming campaign season.
Chapter Six
“We Have to Fight with Our Minds”
World War I, the “war to end all wars,” fought “to make the world safe for democracy,” had concluded with a hard, vengeful, unforgiving peace that wantonly reordered national boundaries and communities. Now there were new victims and conquerors, treacherous and confused alliances, silent or careless bystanders, appeasement and collusion. The map of the world created at Versailles was being burned to ash, drenched in blood. All geographic borders and imperial designs were to be reordered. Hitler had moved slowly, step by step. He paused and waited after every victory. Hearing no protest, seeing no opposition, he had moved on, from the Rhineland in 1936 to Spain, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in 1938.
Now Warsaw had been bombed. ER, involved with planning the 1940 campaign season for the Women’s National Democratic Club with its leaders, Dorothy McAllister and Mary Thompson Evans, could not help but be affected by news of Poland’s invasion. Under other circumstances, she might have felt invigorated by making plans with spirited Democratic women. But part of her heart remained each day with the people in the bombed-out villages of Poland. With every newspaper report, her mind followed the agony of women and children fleeing their burned homes, past fields of dead soldiers, who had ridden horses and farm anim
als to slaughter by German trucks and tanks. There was no escape from the relentless, mechanized Blitzkrieg.
The Democratic women had planned a broadcast for the next week to be held at the White House and feature the president. But FDR told his wife that “in the present crisis he must only speak as the President of all the people, and not as the representative of a particular party.” ER agreed to speak in his stead, and the unprecedented radio event was moved to the club’s headquarters.
The war news caused her to reflect upon her years in school in England during the Boer War. En route to Sweetwater, Tennessee, she wrote her column in the dining car behind a Roanoke newspaper, which provided
a good shield behind which I could observe my neighbors. The train was filled with young girls, all pretty and full of life, evidently returning to school or college. One of them wore a thin gold chain with a cross on it around her neck. It took me back to my childhood when my grandmother gave me a similar one, and I thought of the people who lovingly bestow such a gift, with a prayer in their hearts that it may protect the child. Well, youngsters are going to need those prayers, for they are facing a troubled world.
• • •
The carnage in Poland raised essential questions about U.S. priorities and ended fantasies about isolation: “We must not forget that what we do at home has an effect on the world situation.” The New Deal must be expanded, and Nazism must be defeated.
ER’s mid-September trip coincided with an “orgy of massacre” against Polish civilians. Old people and children, infants in houses, priests and intellectuals were entrapped and burned; prisoners of war were ordered to dig mass graves and were machine-gunned into them; pillage and rape abounded as Nazi killer units, the SS Einsatzgruppen, stormed through Polish towns and villages. There were three million Jews in Poland; in many towns they were herded into synagogues, to be incinerated. The bombing of Warsaw, which continued for weeks, was reportedly most severe on 14 September, coinciding with the Jewish New Year: in Nalewki, the Jewish quarter of Warsaw, “the synagogues were filled.”
Months before the war erupted, in February 1939, Hitler had declared that war would have one result: “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” By mid-September, the SS was calling the program of “racial extermination” a process of “cleansing and security measures,” and it resulted in the slaughter of Poles, Catholics, Jews, and all “suspicious elements.”
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Germany’s chief of military intelligence, and General Johannes Blaskowitz, commander of the German army in Poland, witnessed conditions at the front with horror. These “old school” officers felt disgraced by the wanton brutality and by the unlawful mass civilian executions. Blaskowitz wrote to Berlin that widespread abominable acts threatened the morale of his troops: “Every soldier feels disgusted by these crimes committed in Poland.” But such crimes reflected the new order, and Blaskowitz was soon relieved of his command. No further military complaints followed.
ER’s columns for that week focused on her speaking tour in the South, where she had good audiences. In Gadsden, Alabama, she was impressed by a library for cotton mill workers, a trade school for poor white boys, a nursery school staffed by NYA girls, and other NYA projects for hundreds of formerly neglected young people that now promised meaningful work. Aware of her duties as the election season loomed, ER found time for a cordial lunch with Senator Lister Hill (D-AL) and other politicians.
She and Tommy then toured the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881. At Tuskegee’s impressive teaching hospital, ER met the physician in charge “of the infantile paralysis work and attended a little ceremony in the chapel. Everyone present carried away the choir’s singing in their hearts. The work done here for young colored people is outstanding in the South.” They also visited a “gout hospital for colored veterans, a really fine institution, which, however, is already filled to capacity,” and the new parole board, which boasted for the first time “a woman member.”
After her lecture, sponsored by the Parent Teachers Association, she boarded a train to her next lecture in Danville, Virginia. Then she and Tommy continued to Washington for one overnight. ER was touched to be met at Union Station by her brother Hall and several of his friends. Their breakfast on the White House porch was “a very pleasant beginning to a busy day.”
But her mood was blighted when her husband told her at dinner that the Soviets had entered Poland at six o’clock that morning, 17 September. Those who recalled ex–foreign minister Maxim Litvinov’s six-year effort to forge a united front against Nazi aggression were stunned by Russia’s perfidy. In addition to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Russia had had a nonaggression pact with Poland. Now, William Shirer wrote, “Soviet Russia stabs Poland in the back, and the Red army joins the Nazi army in over-running Poland.”
ER wrote to Aunt Maude Gray, “The attack on Poland by Russia has depressed FDR. He feels we are drawing nearer to that old decision, ‘Can we afford to let Germany win?’ Stalin and Hitler are much alike, aren’t they?”
On 24 August, Anna Louise Strong had written to ER, “I think this [Nazi-Soviet] pact may have saved peace for the time in Europe and without the sacrifice of Poland.” An outspoken journalist and activist, Strong had always had ER’s respect. A minister’s daughter from Nebraska who earned a PhD from the University of Chicago, she devoted her life to feeding hungry children and supporting radical unionists. ER admired her robust manner and mountain-climbing escapades as well as her political enthusiasms. After going with the AFSC’s 1917 famine relief mission to postwar Europe, she worked to build support for the Soviet Union, and ER had been impressed by her reports from Spain. Strong was now married to Joel Shubin, a Soviet official.
Now ER, in her column, rebutted her: “A curious way to aid the cause of peace!” A month later she answered Strong’s letter point by point:
I know that you know Mr. Stalin and I do not know him, and you know the Polish situation far better than I do. I cannot help, however, being distressed at another army on the march, nor can I quite bring myself to trust a man who, as part of a government, wipes out a people’s religion, no matter how the church may have deserved correction, and it seems to me also that wholesale killings are hardly a help to civilization. . . .
Even if [Russia] could [not] conclude a trade treaty with Great Britain and France, did she have to sign up with Germany . . . ? It seems to me that it gave Hitler just the strength he needed to plunge Europe into this horrible war. Hitler might have done it anyway, but one cannot help wondering if these two men might not believe in some of the same things.
ER received war information from many sources, and all the news was ghastly. From Paris, Carmel Offie, Ambassador Bullitt’s assistant, sent a running river of gossip and military updates. He sent Missy LeHand, personal secretary to the president, a “piece of anti-aircraft shell which fell on the terrace outside the Ambassador’s office during our first air-raid.” Offie was amazed by the attitude of calm that seemed to blanket Paris: “Actually, this whole war seems absolutely pointless. I wouldn’t give Martha’s Vineyard for the whole of Europe but the fact is that a mad dog is loose on the Continent, so what is to be done about it?” He hoped Congress would immediately lift the embargo, since France had virtually nothing to fight with.
On 18 September, ER wrote Mary Dreier, “The war continues to be too awful.” But her focus now returned to domestic issues. That day she wrote her column in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where she was appalled by the most distressed mining conditions. As her train journeyed through “beautiful country,” where agriculture and industry converged, she was reminded that “a great nation at peace still has many problems to solve.” The coal mines were now closed in an area where “the extremes of wealth and poverty shook hands” even before these dreadful conditions emerged. For ER, war had only exacerbated the plight of the miners. As the gap between rich and poor widened, she wanted to see these matter
s addressed with “a sense of urgency.”
The Nazi-Soviet Pact had thrown U.S. Communists into disarray. For weeks, the Daily Worker failed to publish the facts of the pact and minimized international coverage. The Soviet newspaper Pravda had announced that Poland was in a state of collapse and chaos: the air force was destroyed, the army was rendered useless, industrial centers had been lost, the government had disappeared. It ignored all Polish resistance and the ongoing defense of Warsaw. According to Pravda, without “any effective help” from Britain and France, Russia was left to liberate and protect the “eleven million Ukrainians and Belorussians” who have lived under Polish rule “in a state of national oppression.” There were “happy days in the liberated villages,” Pravda noted, and the Soviet occupiers were “heartily welcomed” by “jubilant crowds.” In addition to what journalist Alexander Werth called Russia’s “orgy of rapturous articles,” the Russian law enforcement agency (NKVD) deported to the East hundreds of thousands of “hostile or disloyal” Poles, as well as 68,000 Polish officers—additional seeds of future wars.
But Anne O’Hare McCormick’s regular columns in the New York Times, vivid and prescient, stirred ER. The military “monster” that had shattered Polish cities was also terrorizing Romania and Hungary “into a useless stupor.” “Human life has been uprooted and blown about like dust in a pounding wind.” Europe was “crumbling.” “What chance of survival,” McCormick asked, has this new “prison house of conquered nations,” defined by massacres and plunder, hatred and unlimited destruction? “Hitler has let loose a war to begin all wars.” ER agreed with McCormick—“a wise observer of European affairs”—and journalist Dorothy Thompson that “in this war the seeds of other wars are being sown.” There seemed to be no end to the misery human beings were capable of inflicting on one another.
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