Now the toxic dynamic threatened to poison ER’s planning for the 1940 election season. “Your mother and her friends Agnes Brown Leach and Dorothy Schiff Backer,” Tommy wrote, “are keen to start ‘state operations.’” But Leach and Backer refused to work under Nancy Cook. Backer, a generous funder, said she would give much less than before since “nothing is done” under Nancy’s direction. ER and her allies wanted Nancy removed.
Whatever her private feelings and disappointments, from Warm Springs ER listed her reasons for gratitude on Thanksgiving:
I am thankful that I live in a democracy and that it is in the United States of America. I am thankful we are not at war. I am thankful that more of our citizens are thinking about their government today and are realizing their obligations to that government.
I am thankful that I can think as I please, and write as I please and act as I please. . . . I am thankful that in this country, courage can still dominate fear. I am thankful for the answering smile of the passer-by, and the laughter of children in our streets.
Even here in Warm Springs, where many people are facing handicaps which must give them moments of stark terror when they are alone, they can still manage to meet the world with a smile and give one the feeling of a marching army with banners flying.
Thanksgiving revitalized ER’s spirits. Whenever she felt wounded by her husband’s thoughtlessness, or became impatient or distrustful of his political strategies, she considered his heroic determination, his steadfast vision, and his unwavering pleasure in so many things despite his great physical limitations. She loved to watch him in the pool, where his strong arms and torso muscles camouflaged his useless legs, and where he shouted and played with children and adults at various levels of impairment, his own merriment and spirit always in the lead.
Still, race remained an immediate issue of concern for ER during this Thanksgiving visit. Earlier that year FDR had built a new school and infirmary in Warm Springs, “where the patients needing hospital care are housed,” but they were to be segregated. ER decided to build a similar brick school for the area’s many children of color. The Thanksgiving dinner entertainment was integrated and included a chorus from Tuskegee Institute, which was “enjoyed by all.”
Recently, in New York, ER had met with the white Quaker educator Rachel Davis DuBois and been excited by the vision and the pioneering multicultural work of this lifelong activist for peace, women’s rights, and racial harmony. DuBois’s work, inspired by their mutual friend Jane Addams, seemed to ER immediately essential. As a high school teacher in New Jersey, she had been alarmed when her students used racial and religious differences to attack one another. So she decided to create a program “to introduce practical steps . . . for teaching children tolerance and democracy.” She created a Service Bureau for Intercultural Education to show how all groups contributed to America’s power. New York City’s board of education had recently adopted her program.
DuBois’s work, ER wrote with enthusiasm, would benefit “school systems throughout the country. . . . The first step, of course, is to reach the teachers and through them to capture the children’s imagination. To do that, all modern progressive methods are being used. Radio scripts and dramatic episodes are being published . . . and even television will soon be called upon to contribute.” The U.S. Department of Education sponsored and broadcast one of DuBois’s radio series called “Americans All, Immigrants All,” which won the annual award of the Women’s National Radio Committee as the most original program for 1938–39.
During this election season, ER was the only person close to the administration who was determined to discuss hatred and bigotry and their corrosive effect on democracy. But making progress required a movement, and she was relieved that bold visionaries like DuBois worked with Quakers, the NAACP, and WILPF to strengthen that movement. Upon returning to Washington after Thanksgiving, ER had a new demand when she met with various political groups: youth must be added to leadership positions in each organization. If that did not happen, the movement for change and betterment would atrophy and fail.
ER did not criticize her husband’s failure to promote these issues. Instead, she sought to work with him to elect a liberal Democrat as the next president. Although not for publication, she bluntly told anyone who asked that she opposed a third term for him. At the time, she believed he preferred not to run again and that he looked forward to new work in retirement.
After Thanksgiving, ER turned her attention to the needs of refugees. She invited refugee singers and musicians to play at the White House and met regularly with refugee artists and scholars. As she became increasingly active with émigré organizations, she urged her column readers to contemplate “the refugee problem from the point of view of gain to us in the long run,” not just the momentary cost of accommodating their needs, and she advocated a welcoming attitude toward them. Impressive studies showed that “the volume of refugees entering this country to take up permanent citizenship under the quotas was [generally] balanced by the number of foreign people departing from our shores.” Moreover, while “in the old days, a vast majority of people coming in were in the unskilled labor group,” that had changed: “at present it is the educated, highly skilled in both professional and technical work” who arrived in the United States. They brought the skills and means to start businesses, which could “employ some of our own unemployed citizens. It is not, therefore, as one-sided a business as we think. People are not throwing Americans out of work to employ refugees.”
ER’s column on refugees was blasted by those who claimed refugees were agents of Communism, anarchism, and un-Americanism, while others said too many of the refugees were Jews. Bigotry was as epidemic in the United States as it was in the heart of once-enlightened Europe—now dominated by Nazi parties. But ER persevered in her effort to extend her network of activist allies.
More than a thousand activists and educators celebrated her at New York’s Hotel Astor, for the 135th anniversary dinner of The Churchman, a journal of religious activism that was also being honored that night for its campaign against anti-Semitism. Dr. Henry Leiper said that those clerics who employed Nazi propaganda were a “disgrace to their calling.” The great danger to democracy, in his view, came not from enemies within or without but from its friends’ “indifference and blindness.”
Most of the evening was dedicated to ER. Dr. Frank Kingdon, president of the University of New Brunswick (now Rutgers University) said she was “the kindliest of American women, who occupies so unique a place in American life that no other individual can be compared to her.” The journalist Dorothy Thompson said, “Few people received universal admiration, and virtually nobody universal affection. . . . I doubt if any woman in the whole wide world is so beloved.”
The bestowal of the award, noted the New York Times, was “a condensation of the praise” that had been showered on the first lady at the dinner: “To Eleanor Roosevelt, apostle of good-will, for her achievement in abolishing time and space in the pursuit of happiness for all, for her understanding and love of people, and her daring to believe in the potentialities of their best.”
Receiving all these compliments, in addition to the award, felt “somehow a bit unreal,” ER said afterward. “When you sit and hear people whom you admire and respect, say things [you feel] cannot apply to you, and find that you have to get up and accept all this—well, it is disconcerting.” The praise songs that accompanied her award genuinely “bewildered” her.
Speaking to those assembled, ER said she wanted to make it clear that she did nothing extraordinary, just what came to hand. She answered letters, calls, and appeals. She went out and met the people who made up America, to see what they needed and wanted. “Anyone would have done what [I] had done, given the opportunity.” Her goal was simply to promote “better understanding among neighbors.”
Though she remained self-deprecating, this public recognition of and praise for her ef
forts, in the name of the principles and causes closest to her heart, was a proud and gratifying moment. It also fueled her energies for the battles ahead, giving her “courage to keep on trying to be more worthy of all that has been said,” as she acknowledged in her column.
ER would need that courage.
• • •
On the railroad platform that night, while she was waiting for the midnight train to Washington, she encountered some of the AYC leaders who were her friends. They had been summoned to appear the next day before the Dies Committee, which continued to scrutinize allies of the New Deal for links to un-American activities.
The Nazi-Soviet Pact had created tensions and disarray within the AYC and other leftist organizations. Some members remained committed to the Communist dream, believing that the pact had bought Stalin time to build Soviet defenses. In their view, the West had refused all Soviet efforts to form a united front against fascism because it preferred a German-Russian bloodbath, the better to preside over an extended imperial future. Others were horrified by the pact and felt personally betrayed by Stalin’s new partnership with Hitler, who promised annihilation for their families, their parents, and themselves.
This internal conflict served the Dies Committee’s purposes, as former Communists volunteered to ruin, often with lies and exaggerated calumnies, those who remained in the party’s thrall.
In its new round of hearings, the Dies Committee proceedings appalled her, violating her sense of American justice and fair play. That it could get at the “truth” seemed doubtful, since its smear campaign had splattered virtually every decent philanthropist and liberal in Washington. A confidential list of individuals who were allegedly “communist or subversive or un-American,” prepared by the FBI for the committee, amused both ER and FDR. It contained the names of every notable New Dealer and included future secretary of war Henry Stimson, the 1936 Republican nominee for vice president; Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox; and the president’s own mother. “Franklin and I got particular amusement out of the inclusion of her name,” ER recalled. They could picture SDR’s “horror if she were told that the five or ten dollars she had given to a seemingly innocent relief organization put her among those whom the Dies Committee could easily call before it as belonging to subversive organizations.” FDR was repelled not only by the publication of government employees’ names but by the methods employed to obtain them, including break-ins and records thefts. He “denounced the committee’s methods as sordid.”
Moreover, when the committee investigated people who were without “influence or backing,” its “questions were so hostile as to give the impression that the witness had been hailed before a court and prejudged a criminal.” It resembled “intimidation,” and “Gestapo methods.” That show trials had found a happy home in America was not something ER could accept silently. Such tactics never harmed “the really powerful, but they do harm many innocent people who are unable to defend themselves.”
On Wednesday morning, 30 November 1939, the Dies Committee was to question ER’s young friends in the AYC leadership. Summoned to appear within twenty-four hours, they were allowed no time to prepare. ER had decided, with FDR’s approval, to show up and provide moral support for them. Unaccompanied and unannounced, she entered the committee room. “Mrs. Roosevelt appeared at the hearing . . . at about 11:15 A.M., [and] looked around for a seat,” the Times reported. “She wore a stunning dark-green silk dress with matching woolen coat, gloves and felt hat. Her coat and hat were trimmed with Persian lamb.”
Joseph Starnes of Alabama, presiding over the committee in Dies’s absence, noticed her and stopped the testimony: “The chair takes note of the presence of the First Lady of the Land and invites her to come up here and sit with us.”
“Oh, no thank you,” she replied. “I just came to listen.” She found a seat between William Hinckley and Jack McMichael, the current and former chairs of the AYC, who along with Joseph Cadden, the executive secretary, were waiting to be called.
After Starnes’s initial courtesy, the committee ignored her, although as the morning session ended, Jerry Voorhis, of California, a representative sympathetic to the New Deal, asked her if she wished to testify. She replied, “It’s just a question if I can contribute anything to you.”
Then Starnes announced a lunch break until three in the afternoon. ER invited the AYC delegation to lunch at the White House.
Finally at four p.m. the committee called the AYC witnesses. Hinckley, Cadden, and McMichael defended their movement and attacked the committee’s witch-hunt procedures. After the intense questioning, which all observers believed went as well as could be expected, Hinckley was given permission to read the AYC’s petition to discontinue the Dies Committee immediately.
When the long day was over, ER invited the AYC delegation to dine at the White House and stay the night. Joseph Lash of the American Student Union (ASU), who was to testify the next day, was among the group. At the dinner, he later recalled, “in addition to the ‘gutter-snipes,’ as someone had dubbed us,” Hollywood stars Melvyn Douglas and his wife, Helen Gahagan, were present, as were the progressive assistant attorney general Norman Littell and his wife, Katherine; Aubrey Williams, “the embattled head of the NYA who was having almost as much trouble with Mr. Dies as we were”; and Williams’s boss, Colonel Francis Harrington, head of the WPA.
FDR was eager to hear about their experiences and listened pensively to their accounts. He “chuckled, roared,” and suggested he might “be slipped into the hearings under a sheet.” Melvyn Douglas replied that he would be most welcome “as a Ku Kluxer.”
For ER, that dinner party was a “pleasant interlude,” but all was not celebratory that night. On 30 November the Soviets invaded Finland with twenty-six divisions and over 465,000 troops and bombarded Helsinki, the recently redesigned capital city of glass and hope. Unlike the Nazi air raids on Poland, the Soviet attack on Finland was met with significant international protest. Photographs of the damage to Helsinki were published worldwide, accompanied by the details of hospitals overwhelmed by civilian casualties: “One girl, Dolores Sundberg, twelve years old, had both her legs smashed to ragged stumps, and died on the operating table.”
At the White House, FDR said the Soviets had done “a terrible thing.” Lash “shared that view,” but his AYC colleagues were silent. Some clamored to have the U.S. ambassador recalled from Moscow, but FDR opposed that, saying that to sever diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union would make it impossible “to play a constructive role” in whatever peace efforts might emerge. On that point the AYC members agreed with him.
After FDR withdrew, the party moved upstairs to discuss the plight of liberals, who were without leadership on domestic issues now that the war dominated FDR’s concerns. Aubrey Williams, Helen Gahagan, and Melvyn Douglas sought to reforge a popular liberal movement to win the fall election and save the New Deal. Lash found ER “down to earth and practical” as she considered measures “to pull liberals together” for 1940.
Before they left, filled with gratitude for ER’s support, Aubrey Williams looked hard at the youth leaders, and said: “Don’t let her down; it will break her heart!”
When the party finally broke up, ER went to her desk, “piled high with mail.” Late that night Bernard Baruch called from South Carolina to say if she “needed help he would come right up.” At breakfast, ER told her AYC friends that Baruch had offered his home if the “youngsters needed a rest” and said if “there were any expenses, he would be glad to cover them.”
That morning, as the Dies Committee hearings resumed, ER sat with Lash “and spoke with him confidentially” until he was called. According to the Times, “newsreel agencies had cameras, sound equipment and special lights ready for the possibility” that ER would testify, but instead “the elaborate equipment was used to record bits of Lash’s testimony.” ER’s “costume today was all black except for a vivid red scarf.”
For two hours Lash was interrogated by J. B. Matthews, a former Communist now on the Dies Committee staff. Lash and Matthews had actually worked together as Young Socialists, and Lash knew him well. “All of us on the left had gone through many changes,” Lash later reflected, and Matthews “was now on his final journey to the far right.”
Lash had gone to the hearings “with a divided soul,” he subsequently wrote. The ASU had been organized at Columbia University during Christmas 1935 and included the Student League for Industrial Democracy, a Socialist Party organization allied with Norman Thomas; the National Student League, an arm of the Communist Party; and a number of unaffiliated liberal clubs and student societies organized on college campuses throughout America, such as the Harvard Peace Society. Among the original officers were Lash; James Wechsler, director of publications; and Molly Yard, treasurer.
Matthews noted that Communist Party chair Earl Browder had called the ASU a “transmission belt” for the party. Lash insisted it was not. There were Communists in the ASU, he acknowledged, but they did not dominate.
Congressman Jerry Voorhis pressed Lash: why did the ASU allow Communist participation? The ASU was democratic and always supported majority decisions, Lash said. It was concerned with civil liberties, academic freedom, basic and real human needs, peace, and culture. It did not care “what students think,” it cared only that “they should think” and be actively concerned about “social problems.” And it would be “unfair” to “sacrifice the Communists to the lions right now,” when everything was in flux.
Voorhis said Communist policy was unpredictable. Lash replied, “Well, they can’t predict what I’ll think either.” To which a Daily Worker reporter called out, “Hear! Hear!”
At a moment when the questioning became harsh, even vitriolic, ER stood and moved from the back of the room to the press table. “I took a pencil and a piece of paper, and the tone of the questions changed immediately,” she later wrote. “Just what the questioner thought I was going to do, I do not know, but my action had the effect I desired.”
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