The West sent no aid in any form to Poland, even as the siege of Warsaw intensified. Since the declaration of war, Britain had dropped several million anti-Nazi leaflets over Germany and pursued German merchant ships, but without much success. There were no significant troop movements, no real action, no effort even to distract Germany from its relentless assault on Poland. Indeed, according to the New York Times, “to maintain a fighting front,” Polish troops had gone east on the assumption that Germany would “become fully engaged by the British and French on the west.” But, as Hitler gloated, “not a shot had been fired on the western front.”
British and French inaction in these months seemed like betrayal and appeasement. Anti-appeasers were in despair. In London, Harold Nicolson confided details of his “appalling depression” to his diary: “The whole world is either paralysed or against us. These are the darkest hours we have ever endured.” Britain, he discovered, was entirely unprepared for war. At dinner with several friends, he learned that every military branch was “frightfully short of ammunition. . . . [We] have in fact no Army, Navy or Air Force.” Winston Churchill—now restored to his old post as Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty—was making elaborate remilitarization plans for a long war, but nothing could be ready until the spring of 1940.
ER now considered those who continued to clamor for “America’s splendid isolationism” fools or cowards. The era of neutrality was over, at least ideologically. “I hope and pray that we will not have to fight with armed forces in this war, but we do have to fight with our minds, for this is as much a war for the control of ideas as for control of material resources. If certain ideas triumph, then what our forefathers founded in this nation in the way of ideas and ideals would receive a very serious blow.” Everywhere she went, she appealed to her audiences to pressure Congress to revise the Neutrality Act in order to get needed supplies to the United Kingdom and France.
On 19 September, Hitler marched into and “liberated” Danzig, which had been ripped from Germany at Versailles. Crowds greeted him so “hysterical with joy” that it recalled his entry into Vienna, where he had been showered with cheers and flowers; the reception convinced him that “Almighty God has now given our arms his blessing.”
The next day Hitler chose the nearby resort town of Zoppot to finalize his eugenics, or medical-cleansing, program. On 21 September, surrounded by his personal physician and the chief medical officers of the Reich, he decided to secure the “purity of German blood” through the elimination of all medically impaired and mentally deranged patients deemed incurable. Painless gas was the preferred means of “euthanasia.” This program, centered at a clinic in Berlin at 4 Tiergartenstrasse, known therefore as Operation T4, was headed by a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Würzburg, Werner Heyde. Soon seven euthanasia centers were built, for the elimination of imperfect newborns and young children and “feebleminded and asocial” adults.
On 8 September FDR issued a proclamation of “limited national emergency.” He asked for no new legislation, no new executive authority. But then by executive order he authorized increases in the army, navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard; earmarked a considerable sum “for the reparation of Americans caught in the war zone”; and added 150 officers to the Department of Justice “to be used in the protection of the United States against subversive foreign activities within our borders.” Then he called Congress back into session to reconsider the embargo provisions of the Neutrality Act of 1935.
On 21 September, FDR appealed to Congress, saying there was no exclusive “peace bloc.” During the 1920s and 1930s the United States had led many peace efforts because it understood that “any war anywhere necessarily hurts American security and American prosperity.” But the Neutrality Act, he said, had been a deviation from established principles of “neutrality . . . and peace through international law. . . . I regret [that the Congress passed] that act. I regret equally that I signed that act.” He requested from Congress a new policy, called cash-and-carry, by which the United States would sell arms to Britain in exchange for cash; Britain would provide the transportation: “All purchases [will] be made in cash, and all cargoes [will] be carried in the purchasers’ own ships, at the purchasers’ own risk.” This cash-and-carry policy, he said, could avoid a repeat of such incidents as the 1917 sinking of the Lusitania.
Finally, he urged Congress to repeal the arms embargo in the Neutrality Act of 1935.
“Darker periods may lie ahead,” he warned. “The disaster is not of our making; no act of ours engendered the forces which assault the foundations of our civilization. Yet we find ourselves affected to the core; our currents of commerce are changing, our minds are filled with new problems, our position in world affairs has already been altered.” In such circumstances, it was vital to protect American interests.
Rightly considered, this interest is not selfish. The peace, the integrity, and the safety of the Americas—these must be kept firm and serene.
In a period when it is sometimes said that free discussion is no longer compatible with national safety, may you by your deeds show the world that we of the United States are one people, of one mind, one spirit, one clear resolution, walking before God in the light of the living.
But the House declined to repeal the arms embargo, by only two votes, 159 to 157.
ER and Tommy had listened to FDR’s address to Congress on the radio while traveling to Illinois. Afterward ER wrote her husband, “Your message was grand and came over very well, even on the train.”
She had hoped to be sent to Europe for the Red Cross to create a refugee relief effort. Because of the atrocities associated with Hitler’s Blitzkrieg, Secretary of State Hull and Red Cross head Norman Davis had vetoed ER’s plan to go to war zones for purposes of rescue and refuge.
• • •
During her first press conference of the fall, on 27 September, ER stressed that hemispheric peace and U.S. security depended on the repeal of the “dangerous” embargo clause. For Americans to believe they can “go scot-free,” she told the press conference, was to fail to appreciate “the responsibility that lies on us as one great nation at peace. That responsibility is to be thinking seriously of what we can do to alleviate suffering for civilian populations. . . . The only nation that can think of what to do for a future peace is the U.S., so . . . we have a so much greater responsibility than just to think of how we can keep out of war.” During her travels, she said, many people “come up to me and say, ‘Oh, let them stew in their own juice. It’s none of our concern, as long as we can stay out of it.’ That always gives me a horrible, sinking feeling, because you can’t help but suffer when all the rest of the world is suffering.” She had not met one person in the country who did not want to keep out of war, but she insisted Americans must “lead”—be imaginative in thought and action, to work for a lasting peace.
Asked if she was still a pacifist, she replied, “I have never been a pacifist in the sense that I don’t believe in defending this country, but I am most anxious to do everything possible to prevent war wherever one possibly can.” What had she meant when she said during her tour that “one should not think only of one’s own skin and one’s own pocket book”? “In the end,” she replied, “if the skins of the rest of the world are removed and the pockets of the rest of the world are empty, we will grow thin and lean.”
Did “the foreign situation” ensure her husband’s third term? ER demurred, suggesting the reporter consult the president. Had the president ever criticized her columns? someone asked. The first lady laughed: he “never said a word about a thing [I] wrote. . . . We are very careful about not trying to influence each other.” What about their frequent use of the same expressions? ER replied that it was “natural,” since they “were enormously interested in the same things. We do talk things over in a general way. We argue about everything in the world.” After all, “we do not just sit at meals and look at
each other.” But while they talked about everything, she “never tried to influence the President in anything he did and . . . he had not tried to influence her.” They took it for granted that they would each do what they “considered the right thing.” Their marriage represented the best possible alliance of independence and deep connectedness. They both grew within it, while drawing closer and farther apart.
On 28 September Warsaw fell to the Nazis. German troops did not immediately occupy the Polish capital, but they took prisoner 140,000 Polish soldiers and massacred Warsaw’s civilian leadership, rounding up over 10,000 teachers, doctors, librarians, priests, journalists, writers, business leaders, and landowners for slaughter.
From the U.S. embassy in Paris, Carmel Offie sent details to the White House. American ambassador to Warsaw, Anthony “Tony” Biddle, and his wife had arrived on 24 September and “are now living at the Embassy Residence.” Bullitt was trying to restore their spirits: “The stories they tell are, to say the least, gruesome.” John Cudahy, who had been U.S. ambassador to Poland from 1933 to 1937, told Missy LeHand, “If you feel sad think of me. . . . No trace can be found of my former secretary, or her mother. And a family I knew best of all has vanished without a trace. Everyone in the Eastern half of Poland have lost every stick of their possessions, and I suppose with the few exceptions of Pro-Germans, everyone in German occupied Poland is little better off.”
Twenty-two million Poles were now under Nazi rule. Two days later Pravda published a photograph of Molotov and Ribbentrop signing the “German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty.” Poland, the borderland of rolling plains and industrial resources, was dismantled and partitioned again, for the fifth time in history. In exchange for including Lvov and its nearby oilfields on the Soviet side of the new border, Russia promised to supply Germany 300,000 tons of oil a year.
ER wrote nothing about these specific events, but every morning she read several newspapers and enjoyed columns by journalists such as Anne O’Hare McCormick, who railed against Soviet expansion and was particularly disturbed about Lvov. McCormick considered the fate of that town, formerly Lemberg in the Hapsburg Empire and the center of the Ukrainian independence movement, “even sadder” than the fate of Warsaw. The specter of Communism throughout Eastern Europe, the reason so many appeasers preferred Hitler to a treaty with Russia, was for McCormick the primary fear: “Hitler has released forces he is powerless to control.” The weak Central European states, like Romania, “are more vulnerable to Soviet than to Nazi penetration. . . . The Nazi-Soviet alliance is a merger of the forces of destruction.” They are united in “revolt against European civilization.”
Britain did not believe the Nazi-Soviet alliance would last, and most of Britain’s leadership, as well as public opinion, preferred war to a servile peace with Hitler. But U.S. ambassador to Britain Joseph Kennedy counseled FDR to avoid providing any support for the doomed nations. The Soviets were prepared to take over the Balkans and the Baltic States, and the Nazis were ready to move on Belgium and Holland. Kennedy was certain there was nothing to be done. He believed Churchill would do anything to get the United States into the war, but Britain would “go down fighting”—it could not possibly win.
Some argued that the German people were prepared to remove Hitler, Kennedy wrote to FDR, but that could result in chaos, and Germany could turn Communist. Then this nation of eighty million hungry people would be an even greater “menace to Europe.” Surely the United States did not “want any part of this mess.”
He urged FDR to reconsider his commitment to the putative democracies. The coming war would not be “a holy war.” After all, Kennedy insisted, democracy in France and England hardly existed: England was not a democracy “in our sense of the word,” having always been ruled by its “governing class.” And “France is ruled by a dictatorship which has just this week made illegal one of the largest Parliamentary parties,” the Communist Party, and expelled elected Communist members from Parliament.
The United States had nothing to gain, Kennedy advised, nothing to win, and no reason to support “a hopeless struggle” that could only end in “the complete collapse of everything we hope and live for,” no matter who won. Therefore “we should curb our sentiments and sentimentality and look to our own vital interests,” which lay in the western hemisphere. “It may not be convenient for us to face a world without a strong British Empire. But . . . we shall have to face it . . . and the leadership of the English-speaking world will, willy-nilly, be ours.”
Kennedy visited his friend Nancy Astor, finding her fully committed to Britain’s war effort and vigorously allied with Stella Reading, ER’s great friend who founded the Women’s Voluntary Service in 1938. They “wanted to know when America was coming in and of course I told them we weren’t coming,” he wrote his wife, Rose. “So perhaps, dear, you went home [to the United States] at the height of your husband’s popularity.”
ER disagreed entirely with Kennedy’s defeatist isolationism. His willingness to sacrifice Britain rendered him a pariah, even in FDR’s eyes. To an antiwar correspondent who believed that one “who goes to war for an ideal sacrifices his ideals,” she replied, “I agree with you in theory but I would rather die than submit to rule by Hitler or Stalin, would not you?”
• • •
During her autumn tour, most of ER’s columns dealt with the people she met, the books she read, and her observations. She kept busy lest she plunge into one of her “Griselda moods,” never far from her heart these bitter days. As she worked to fortify the people who benefited from and worked for New Deal agencies, she fortified herself. She believed fervently that war and civil war arose when countries neglected the real needs of the people.
She was disheartened to see, firsthand, how economically depressed parts of the country remained. The New Deal had achieved much in housing, employment, and hope, but as she traveled through West Virginia, its failures and limitations were apparent.
We passed first through a coal-mining section . . . with bad housing and underfed children. Then, for a time, a rather fertile farming country. Later, some small oil and natural gas wells. Just before we reached Glenville, some badly eroded hillsides. . . . They have been denuded of trees and are now being used as pastures or cornfields. But shortly there will be no soil on which anything can grow. Strange that people will not realize that lack of soil conservation eventually means not only loss in land productivity but deterioration in human beings.
In Carbondale, Illinois, “two very kind and enthusiastic young men” working for the NYA gave her a tour. Although Illinois had “risen to fifth place among oil-producing states,” it was still one of America’s most depressed regions, much to her grief. The farming and mining populations were both “at a very low ebb,” and “one of the counties near Carbondale has the greatest number of people on relief in any one county in the U.S.” But there were also hopeful signs of community renewal: the region’s flourishing NYA project not only employed but educated “boys who never had an opportunity for acquiring any work skill or getting any job” beyond that of “temporary day-laborer.” In addition to programs for gardening and “subsistence farming” skills, the boys were being trained “in auto-mechanics, electrical wiring, woodworking and iron work. They have the advantage of being near a State Teachers’ College which is cooperating in every way.” There were also wonderful “monuments to WPA work—a paved and widened main street, a fine armory, other lasting improvements.”
On a return swing through West Virginia, ER visited the Red House, a resettlement community built under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration. She believed in the value of these projects, like Arthurdale, that were new communities of comfort and dignity. She was pleased that the Charleston Business and Professional Women’s Club sponsored a handicrafts project for local women to learn “various handicrafts” for home consumption and sale. As she set out all the changes under way, ER made a compelling plea to
her readers: “I wish more people . . . would take an interest in their government homestead, for there is so much that can be done for these communities if people nearby lend a hand. I have never felt that the government should be expected to carry the burden alone.”
Also in West Virginia, she visited a WPA project that included a Crippled Children’s Hospital, with a pool to benefit all the children of the region: “The pool is one of the most delightful I have ever seen.”
After that, she returned to Washington for a brief visit. She dashed in to see her husband in his office on 28 September but wrote nothing of their conversation. Most of her time “was spent in a truly feminine and frivolous matter—getting my hair done.” In her lightning stopover, ER was happy to see that young Diana Hopkins and her ailing father, Harry, were “in such good spirits. Diana is evidently a good companion.”
After the Washington stopover, ER resumed her tour, reaching Wilmington, Delaware, and Reading, Pennsylvania. The new public address systems now found in most halls helped keep her “voice on its natural pitch. This is to me a great relief!”
Finally she reached New York City, where she visited art galleries, attended a reception for women sculptors and painters, and visited the World’s Fair twice in three days. Although she did not mention Hick, those two visits were in part to see her great friend. Hick’s work at the fair so absorbed her that she was in an uncommonly good mood. Between the fair and her weekend place on Long Island, she seemed uncomplaining and satisfied.
At the General Motors pavilion, ER found the recent discoveries in science on display to be “the most encouraging thing I have seen.” In a world only recently introduced to electricity and telephones, the rapid changes in transportation and communication would open vast opportunities for employment and comfort “if our scientists are able to delve further into the mysteries which lie all about us in the universe.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3 Page 18