Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  ER’s commitment to her new young friends coincided with her growing disappointment over some decisions made by her son Elliott. In an October radio address, he had “lauded” the Dies Committee, saying it “has done more for the United States in the last two years than many able and sincere statesmen achieve in a lifetime. If it has done nothing else, it has made the people conscious of the fact that in their midst, perhaps in their own circle of friends, are men and women who despise everything this Government stands for.” And now he was campaigning for politicians who aggravated her husband, such as Vice President John Nance Garner. ER understood that all children have to rebel in their own way, and often in strange ways. She and FDR never publicly criticized their own children.

  ER’s holiday was also marked by personal sadness—the sudden death of Heywood Broun, president of the Newspaper Guild. In a column, she expressed her “deep respect and genuine affection” for the controversial journalist: “he set us all a high standard in that he wrote what he really believed. . . . No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling. He was critical sometimes, but almost always there was something constructive about his criticisms.”

  Her 1939 Christmas message was in part a tribute to Broun’s advice, “Drink ye all of it.” She concluded, “This is the season for forgiveness and self-searching.” She urged everybody to “do something a bit unusual,” to go beyond “customary gifts” to families, friends, charities—and provide “unexpected pleasure.”

  Her article of “inspiration especially for the children and youth of our time” was featured for Christmas Eve in the New York Times:

  “Peace on earth, good-will toward men!” . . . He came into this world as a defenseless, helpless Baby, born in a stable and laid in a manger, because the world of His day had no room for the poor and He belonged to a group which was oppressed and harassed.

  In the year 1939 the angels’ song will be repeated in homes and in churches throughout the world, perhaps even in forts and in trenches where men lie in wait to kill each other.

  After all these years the world is still the same, a world in which groups of people are harassed and oppressed. A world in which there is danger, just as there used to be—danger even to the lives of little children.

  Just as “the kings of old knew that their material power would not save them,” it was clear today that “comfort and ease” guaranteed nothing. Young people especially had that “vision of Christ in their hearts” and acted generously for good—“full of enthusiasm and bent on seeing happiness reign in the world.” But “Peace on earth, good-will toward men” would occur only when “this song in our hearts [entered] into our daily way of life.” Only then would the world become “a place of joy and peace!”

  ER’s Christmas season was full, with tree-lighting ceremonies, children’s parties, church services, her columns, and a broadcast “right in the middle of dinner, but . . . I was back before the next course was served.” Stockings filled by Santa caused much excitement and merriment, a reading of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol edited by granddaughter Sistie and FDR. There was an afternoon ride in the park with family friend Harry Hooker, and an unusual newsworthy reality: “We tried very hard at dinner to make the President enter into a real, old-fashioned, family argument. But he said the Christmas spirit was upon him and he was not going to argue with anyone!”

  During the week there were films, including Gone with the Wind, which dazzled everybody. Even critical SDR “sat through” the entire four-hour film—which ended at two a.m.! There were also meetings on youth and conferences on a new Institute on Human Relations sponsored by the National Council of Christians and Jews.

  As the New Year approached, ER was surprised to be invited to succeed Heywood Broun as president of the Newspaper Guild. On 30 December she sent a telegram to decline: “Absolutely impossible for me to take full-time job so could not even consider the position.” She was also asked to consider the presidency of Bryn Mawr. She and Helen Taft Manning, President Taft’s daughter and the college’s dean since 1925, seemed to be serious contenders. Appropriately, Manning was named Bryn Mawr’s president.

  On New Year’s Eve, ER wished everyone would make the effort in every locality to “meet the needs of the people,” so that “when peace comes again to the world, we may have a concrete contribution to make in proof that through democratic methods a great nation has been able to face its own problems, and at least attempt to solve them.” To match her wish, ER’s last act of the year was to give significant “financial and moral support” to launch Rachel Davis DuBois’s experiment in multicultural education in five New York high schools. ER believed this would aid boys and girls of different groups to respect and enjoy one another: “Fun and hard work would be combined.”

  Chapter Eight

  The Politician and the Agitator: New Beginnings

  ER’s first column for 1940 contained a simple yet vastly portentous phrase: “The New Year is a time for new beginnings.” Politically, she agreed with Harold Nicolson, who wrote in his diary, “The old year is foul and the new year is terrifying.”

  Throughout the holidays, highlighted by family and grandchildren, both ER and FDR were deeply disturbed by the information they received from their closest, most trusted sources. Letters and reports from friends posted abroad enabled the first couple, separately and together, to face the mounting challenges of the world at war with clarity and determination.

  Those countries not yet at war with Nazi Germany were under immediate threat. ER’s friend Caroline Drayton Phillips, wife of the U.S. ambassador to Italy, recorded her vivid impressions as various refugees and notables visited the U.S. embassy in Rome. With Russia’s invasion of Finland, a wanton effort “to destroy a free and peaceful country,” the continual unfolding “of horror in the world” reached a new level of “cruelty and destruction, tales of which come to us from every side.”

  Martha Gellhorn, in Finland on assignment for Collier’s magazine, sent ER extraordinary eyewitness accounts. ER had promised Edna Gellhorn to look into her daughter’s whereabouts, and a week later Edna wrote: “Praise be, and thanks to you! The enclosed message has this moment come to my door. . . . She was in Helsinki at the very moment the war started.” ER replied, “I am delighted that Martha Gellhorn was back in touch again [but] I do wish she were safely back here.”

  Most of Martha’s letters—those sent to her husband, Ernest Hemingway, and those to her mother—were forwarded to ER. Gellhorn’s reports showed ER clearly the oppressions and sufferings of the Soviet invasion. The day it began, 30 November 1939, Gellhorn had written to Hemingway, there was an air raid in the morning, but the Soviet bombers only “dropped propaganda leaflets [that said] ‘You know we have bread, why do you starve?’” Since it was well known that Finland was a rare nation in which nobody starved, she considered the Russian effort ridiculous. Then they bombed the people, farms, workplaces, and houses all over Helsinki. The bombers

  came in unseen, dived to 200 metres (imagine) and dumped the stuff. From the sound and results they must have been 500 kilo bombs, and they dumped thermite as well. I never felt such explosions. . . . [I saw] three colossal fires, four big apartment houses—just plain people’s homes—burning like tissue paper. Glass was shattered for six and seven blocks. . . . A burning bus lying beside it, and a man shapeless and headless. . . . The people are marvelous, with a kind of pale frozen fortitude. They do not cry and they do not run; they watch with loathing but without fear this nasty sudden business which they did nothing to bring on themselves.

  By the time Gellhorn wrote again, a week later, she had received two cables from Hemingway as well as a letter from FDR that gave her the sole “privilege” to go to the front. “War in the arctic is a very remarkable business,” she observed. “The climate is the best protection as are the forests. . . . It snows and we are not bombed.” The Finns fought on bicycles and on s
kis, and everybody hid in the forests at night. Their “pilots are wonderful. And they can’t be starved like our beloved Spaniards; they already produce 90% of their own food.” Gasoline and munitions were the major problems, but Gellhorn would bet “on 3 million Finns against 180 million Russkis. After all, they are fighting for their lives and their homes and God alone knows why the Russians are fighting.”

  In fact, the Russians wanted the port of Hango and about two thousand square miles of Finnish territory along the Gulf of Finland, to protect and enhance Leningrad’s access to the sea. They had offered payment and territory farther north. But after two months of negotiations, the Finns refused, and the Soviet forces invaded. For a country that was minimally militarized, Finland fought with valor and vigor and held the Red Army off through the long winter of 1940–41.

  The Finns also introduced a new hand-thrown weapon they named a “Molotov cocktail”—because Russia said it dropped bread, not bombs.

  • • •

  In the United States there was tremendous bipartisan support for Finland, but ER’s sympathy embraced all the refugees, including the Poles. From the American embassy in Rome, Caroline Phillips wrote that at Cracow University, the Germans had ordered the faculty to attend a conference by a German professor. When they arrived, they discovered a Gestapo officer, who announced that since the university was known “to be anti-German, the professors were to be arrested and sent to Germany and their wives and children turned out of their homes, which was forthwith done.”

  Some good news arrived from Italy. Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano told Ambassador William Phillips that “Mussolini had reversed his order for expelling the 3500 German Jewish refugees from Italy into a concentration camp in German Poland” and would allow them to remain. He also rescinded an order to expel an American journalist, at Phillips’s request. Caroline proudly told ER that her husband’s “efforts have saved many people from misery.”

  On 20 October 1939, Pope Pius XII had issued a remarkable encyclical condemning racism and urging Poland’s restoration. Summi Pontificatus, “On the Unity of Humanity”—often referred to as “Darkness Over the Whole Earth”—was an extraordinary declaration. In 117 paragraphs the pope established his creed for his followers and announced his vision for a postwar future of love and inclusion across all religious and national boundaries: the restoration of God’s mandate to all his children everywhere to respect and love one another.

  The goal of his office and his church, the pope announced, was to “restore and ennoble all human society and to promote its true welfare.” Christ’s teachings were not limited to the members of His Church but extended “to a world in all too dire need of help and guidance.”

  Germany’s abandonment “of the noble kingdom of law” for the unlimited ruthless “rule of force” now threatened the “unity of the human race.” “Our paternal heart is torn by anguish as We look ahead to all that will yet come forth from the baneful seed of violence and of hatred for which the sword today ploughs the blood-drenched furrow. . . .

  “Can there be . . . a greater or more urgent duty” than to resist the falsehoods of this bitter moment? “What heart is not inflamed . . . at the sight of so many brothers and sisters who, misled by error, passion, temptation and prejudice,” have “wantonly” broken all ethical precepts from “the Tablets of God’s Commandments” to “the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount”? To abandon the law of truth and the law of love is to travel a road that leads to “spiritual and moral bankruptcy” and returns the world to chaos.

  Therefore humanity must remember: as “God’s children,” we are the “culmination of His creative work, made . . . in His Own image,” however scattered and diverse, always and everywhere united by His Love. We are kin in “one great family,” and no matter the differences of speech or national origin, “principles of equality” prevail. “In the midst of the disruptive contrasts which divide the human family,” we return to the unity of bonds that unite us, where “there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free.”

  Appealing directly to “the rulers of the peoples,” he wrote:

  Venerable Brethren, the hour when this Our first Encyclical reaches you is in many respects a real “Hour of Darkness” . . . in which the spirit of violence and of discord brings indescribable suffering. . . . The blood of countless human beings . . . raises a piteous dirge over a nation such as Our dear Poland, which . . . has a right to the generous and brotherly sympathy of the whole world, while it awaits, relying on the powerful intercession of Mary . . . the hour of a resurrection in harmony with . . . justice and true peace. . . .

  Pray then, . . . pray without ceasing . . . that all may be one.

  Many warned that this stirring message was merely a subterfuge, but we may only assume that when ER and FDR read it, they expected that in the coming days of unfolding dread, Pope Pius XII would turn out to be an ally. Its message caused ER to imagine new cooperative efforts for sanctuary and refuge.

  FDR and the pope had met on 6 November 1936 when, as secretary of state for Pope Pius XI, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli had traveled to Hyde Park. Now, since so many European refugees were Catholic, FDR hoped that the Vatican might become a stirring voice of moral authority for rescue and sanctuary and might galvanize Latin American nations to greater activity. Over 70 percent of Americans wanted no change in the U.S. quota system—and FDR saw no reason to waste any of his political capital on fighting to raise the quotas. But over time papal support would make it easier for him to cast the growing refugee crisis as a universal issue.

  FDR responded to the pope in a letter:

  Your Holiness: Because, at this Christmas time, the world is in sorrow, it is especially fitting that I send you a message of greeting and of faith.

  The world has created for itself a civilization capable of giving to mankind security and peace firmly set in the foundations of religious teachings. Yet, though it has conquered the earth, the sea, and even the air, civilization today passes through war and travail. . . .

  Because the people of this nation have come to a realization that time and distance no longer exist in the older sense, they understand that that which harms one segment of humanity harms all the rest. They know that only by friendly association between the seekers of light and the seekers of peace everywhere can the forces of evil be overcome.

  In these present moments, no spiritual leader, no civil leader can move forward . . . to terminate destruction and build anew. Yet the time for that will surely come.

  It is, therefore, my thought . . . that we encourage a closer association between those in every part of the world—those in religion and those in government—who have a common purpose.

  I am, therefore, suggesting to Your Holiness that it would give me great satisfaction to send to You my personal representative in order that our parallel endeavors for peace and the alleviation of suffering may be assisted.

  When the time shall come for the re-establishment of world peace . . . great problems of practical import will face us all. Millions of people of all races, all nationalities and all religions may seek new lives by migration to other lands or by re-establishment of old homes. Here, too, common ideals call for parallel action.

  I trust, therefore, that all of the churches of the world which believe in a common God will throw the great weight of their influence into this great cause.

  In retrospect, FDR’s conviction that no national or religious leader could more vigorously oppose the cascading horrors remains inexplicable. However, his letter to the pope was neither cynical, spontaneous, nor casual. Its terms were so clear that ER, who rarely commented on her husband’s diplomacy, fervently believed that FDR’s decision to write the pope—controversial at the time—was wise and significant.

  Both Caroline and William Phillips were tremendously enthusiastic about FDR’s “very fine letter” and Willi
am read it to their luncheon guests on 24 December. It gave everybody there hope that a new alliance would result.

  On 23 December FDR announced that the industrialist Myron Taylor would be U.S. ambassador to the Vatican but made no mention of aiding refugees. Rather, in his discussions with the pope, Taylor was to follow specific guidelines: to prevent the war from spreading, and to establish common ground upon which to build a structure for permanent peace. He told Taylor to emphasize four points: “freedom of religion; freedom of communication, news and knowledge; reduction of armament, and freedom of trade.”

  On 7 January 1940, FDR received a long letter of gratitude from the pope, who looked forward to receiving Taylor, well known as a man of peace.

  As supportive as ER was of FDR’s efforts concerning the Vatican, she wanted him to do more for refugees. The situation in Europe had become dire. The longtime pacifist Oswald Garrison Villard filed a report for the Nation stating that buried, actually covered up, in the “flood of war news” was the latest development in Hitler’s crusade against the Jews. The Nazis were deporting Jews from Austria, Moravia, and elsewhere in an effort “to jam them all into a small piece of Polish territory which is to be called a ‘Jewish state,’ but which is to be nothing else than a huge concentration camp and charnel house.”

  This issue of the resettlement of the Jews would turn out to be not only the most controversial situation ER would have to tend to but also an emotionally wrenching one. She had characterized FDR as “the politician” and herself as “the agitator.” The world needed both, she had said. But anti-Semitism in America would prove to be a stronger foe than she had expected.

  Hitler, Villard continued, seemed “obsessed with the idea of moving minorities” and was determined to “dump all the Jews possible into a territory at present described as ‘from Nisko on the River San to a point southwest of Lublin.’” All Jews were to leave without their belongings, thus to be stripped of their possessions and “robbed of all their wealth.” Lacking supplies, tools, or money, they would be unable to till the soil or do any business. They were not expected to survive.