Several books lifted her spirits. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars, dedicated to airline pilots and “their dead,” left her with an intensified understanding of real courage—which involved “a zest for life [no less than] contempt for death.” Indeed, the book was not about contempt for death at all but about responsibility. Without responsibility, “contempt for death is the sign either of an impoverished soul or of youthful extravagance.” ER agreed with Saint-Exupéry’s definition of responsibility: “It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one’s comrades. It is to feel, when setting one’s stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.” His words caused her to observe “some of our young people today, who rather clumsily express their desire to keep this country at peace and continue . . . to make life more worth living.” Their attitude stemmed from their sense of responsibility for world conditions. Their courage to accept that responsibility, she concluded, was probably the courage most needed today.
She exhorted her readers to consider the most needful issues before every community, recommending Elsie Clapp’s new book, Community Schools in Action, and she wondered what might be done to improve the plight of handicapped children. The National Society for Crippled Children’s Easter seal drive was on, and the need was more urgent than ever. Each state required significant federal aid for the care, education, and treatment of physically handicapped children. Almost two million children in the United States “needed special education, and less than ten percent” received it.
• • •
ER’s Florida sojourn coincided with FDR’s vacation cruise aboard the Tuscaloosa in the Caribbean and through the Panama Canal. As he neared Colón, Panama, to “inspect the Atlantic defenses and cross to the other side,” he sent a cable addressed “Dear Babs.” Concerned about her well-being after their public ordeal, he was unusually instructive: “I was glad to get your telegram. . . . Do get a real rest even if some of the mail gets ‘acknowledged’ instead of answered.” He anticipated splendid fishing, “and I’ve already had lots of sleep and some sunlight.”
Their vacations also coincided with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles’s mission to visit British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French prime minister Édouard Daladier, as well as Mussolini and Hitler. As FDR’s personal emissary, bypassing ordinary diplomatic channels, Welles undertook this desperate, controversial, fact-finding trip in an effort to forestall worldwide catastrophe, keep Italy neutral, and pursue every hope that might lead to negotiations for disarmament and a just and durable peace.
In Berlin, Hitler’s swagger “horrified” Welles. The Nazis, in a triumphant and celebratory mode, greeted him with contempt and exhibited no interest in FDR’s overture. Indeed, their manner toward Welles was “arrogant and brutal,” Nicolson was told. As European antifascists prepared for Hitler’s next step, Welles departed for England.
England’s strategy was still uncertain. In London, U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy foretold defeat and disaster if America joined Europe’s war. Harold Nicolson’s parliamentary allies were horrified by Kennedy’s evident willingness to accept a negotiated peace on Hitler’s terms. “In this he will have the assistance of the old appeasers,” the Communists who followed the meanderings of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and “left-wing pacifists.”
In France, a strange torpor, a brooding national fatigue, seemed to cloud political vision and sway public opinion. Communists and unionists were being arrested, hounded, and isolated, while fascist fifth columnists were ignored. Ambassador Bullitt’s assistant Robert Murphy said the Communists were the primary appeasers. The fifty Communist deputies in Parliament, before being jailed the previous September, had “faithfully followed Moscow’s lead” and opposed France’s preparations for war. In Paris, Ilya Ehrenburg was more agitated by France’s continuous disregard for Nazi atrocities: the only outrages it seemed to notice were those committed by Russia in the Soviet-Finnish War. Those who proclaimed it useless to “die for Danzig” now proclaimed it “necessary to die for Helsinki.” Those who considered it impossible to fight on the Rhine now considered it possible to fight for Vyborg. Yet nothing was done; no troops marched; no tanks moved; no planes flew overhead. French generals opined that France was safe, protected and forever secured by the Maginot line.
When Welles returned to Washington, he pleaded for more military and economic aid for France. His plea bitterly exacerbated State Department rivalries. William Bullitt, who considered himself FDR’s primary European adviser, was aghast at Welles’s assignment, taking it as a slap in his face, undermining all his efforts for more aid to France. His resentment of Welles grew into a destructive hatred that permanently affected U.S. policy.
The diplomatic community now had no doubt that Hitler’s goal was world conquest. The democracies would need to do far more in unity and with vigor to block his next moves. ER was keenly aware of that; at the AYC, she had rejected Abbott Simon’s criticisms of France. We were, she said, all responsible for this situation: how can we criticize others when we ourselves have done so little?
It was at the bleakest point of her Florida vacation that she received a cable from Stockholm signed by twenty-four international women’s organizations, representing “various ideals and political views.” It was “addressed through me to all American women.” The organizations agreed on a resolution calling upon all women everywhere to focus on “the consequences of a total war in all its inhumanity.” Given current conditions, “women of all countries” must unite “to stop the process of devastation and prevent the impending catastrophe which threatens humanity.”
In February 1940, public opinion polls revealed overwhelming opposition to U.S. involvement in the European war. A Gallup poll showed that 85 percent of America wanted to stay out. When asked, if Germany appeared to be “defeating England, should the United States declare war on Germany?” 71 percent answered no. Fortune’s poll found that while 85 percent thought America might be drawn into the war, 38 percent believed it would be because of “business interests” or government manipulation; 14 percent because of Allied propaganda; and 34 percent because “we hated Hitler.” Only 1.2 percent thought “we must help the democracies.”
One point two percent—the figure staggered ER. In that bitter context, she spent her last evenings in Florida in the company of Martha Gellhorn, who flew over from Cuba. Gellhorn updated ER about Finland and gave her a copy of her new novel, A Stricken Field, a collection of stories about Czechoslovakia that were rooted also in Gellhorn’s feelings about Spain. She was, ER rhapsodized, one of America’s best foreign correspondents and “an exciting person. . . . She has seen so much in Europe and felt it as only a really good writer can. I enjoyed every minute of our talk.”
Gellhorn, like ER and Joe Lash, regarded Spain as the moral compass. It was where antifascist people of courage turned for hope. An entire generation of activists, writers, and artists had met there and boldly fought dreadful evil. Ilya Ehrenburg explained Spain’s moral impact on the world.
It was difficult to breathe in the disturbed and humiliated Europe of the thirties. Fascism was advancing, and advancing unhindered. Every country, and even every man, hoped to save themselves singly, save themselves at all costs, achieve safety by silence, buy themselves off. . . . And then suddenly, a people arose that accepted battle. It did not save itself, nor did it save Europe, but if . . . there still remains any meaning in the words “human dignity,” it is thanks to Spain. Spain became the air that allowed people to breathe.
Only Spain and Finland, Gellhorn felt, had stood up against evil and fought back. After she left Finland, she had stopped in Paris because she had learned that France had arrested some of Spain’s most intrepid heroes, including Germany’s bold antifascist writer and Spanish Civil War hero Gustav Regler. Gellhorn had pleaded for his release from a French detention center for enemy aliens, without
success. Perhaps ER could do something? she now asked. ER would, of course, do her utmost. Ultimately Regler was released and found sanctuary in Mexico.
• • •
As ER considered the herculean tasks that faced contemporary youth, her thoughts turned to great teachers and to her own great teacher, Marie Souvestre. ER’s love for literature, history, geography, music, and the arts had all been enhanced by Madame Souvestre, whose love of learning and of life had inspired her students with a passion for life’s enchantments. As she ruminated and read on vacation in Florida, she recalled all those maps she was meant to memorize—the geography lessons and history lessons, the wars without end that humanity has endured. Friends from her student days were now endangered as Europe entered a state of siege. She quoted at length Mary Ellen Chase’s celebration of great teachers, A Goodly Fellowship, because Chase’s “conception of the good teacher agrees with my own.”
For ER, “teaching and being taught are always inextricably woven together, for there is really no better way of learning,” and good teachers, who “must really love” their subjects, were in a perpetual state of learning. Chase referred to a great teacher, whom ER knew and admired—William Allan Neilson, a Shakespearean scholar and president emeritus of Smith College. ER thought “all of us will do well to remember” Neilson’s farewell address to the students of Smith, because he named the enemy—the elusive enemy, he
who always puts the body before the spirit, the dead before the living; who makes things only to sell them; who has forgotten that there is such a thing as truth, and [who] measures the words by advertisement or by money; who daily defiles the beauty that surrounds him and makes vulgar the tragedy. . . . The Philistine, the vulgarian, the great sophist, all the greedy, selfish, egocentric manipulators [with] outposts inside us persecuting our peace, spoiling our sight, confusing our values . . .
A certain very popular educator, an “enchanting classicist,” had recently been in urgent need of help. The extraordinary Dr. Vera Lachmann was the headmistress of an academy in Berlin-Grunewald “for half-Aryan and Jewish boys and girls.” She had founded the school in April 1933 and maintained it despite “mounting difficulties,” until the Nazi government ordered it closed on 1 January 1939. After that, she gave private lessons, volunteered with Kate Rosenheim and other concerned Germans who worked to secure shelter for Jewish children abroad; in the spring she gave a lecture series on Rilke. Her sister Nina took the last scheduled flight out of Berlin to London in July, but Vera explained to her worried friends that she intended to remain in Berlin so long as she might be useful to others.
Amid mounting rumors that Jewish scholars, attorneys, and physicians had been rounded up by the Nazis and had subsequently disappeared, Dr. Lachmann’s German friends and colleagues persuaded her to try to leave. U.S. friends organized to rescue her and petitioned the U.S. consul in Berlin for an “ex-quota visa.” But such visas were limited to university faculty, and despite appeals from many scholars and from Vassar College’s president H. N. MacCracken, who offered Lachmann a “generous contract” to teach at Vassar, the State Department was unwilling to grant her a visa.
After months of delay, her friends turned to ER. President MacCracken explained the situation in detail: “Dr. Lachmann, who is a cousin of Erich Warburg of New York, was deprived of her position owing to her race, and since 1933 has conducted an advanced school for Jewish students driven from universities and gymnasia in Germany.” But the U.S. consul refused to consider her school “an academy, seminary, college, or university.” Vassar’s president included a letter from Radcliffe dean W. K. Jordan, assuring the State Department that “the academic board of Radcliffe College considered the instruction to be equivalent to that offered students regularly enrolled in an American college.” Her school was equivalent to a gymnasium, and Erika Weigand, a Radcliffe student who studied at Dr. Lachmann’s school from 1933 to 1935, had received college credits for her work. MacCracken assured ER that Dr. Lachmann was an esteemed scholar of “published works and recognized ability, and in every way the equal of other members of the Vassar faculty.”
Erika’s parents, Frances Rhoades Weigand and Dr. Hermann Weigand, chair of Yale’s department of Germanic languages, sent personal letters to ER. “Vera Lachmann is not only our dearest friend,” Frances Weigand wrote, “but a person we dare not let the world lose.” Hermann Weigand added, “I believe Dr. Lachmann to be one of the most valuable people alive in the world today.” He thanked President MacCracken for “whatever you may be able to do to secure for this life the possibility of continued existence and a sphere of usefulness.”
ER was moved by these many appeals. This profoundly learned classicist had graduated magna cum laude in German literature and Greek philosophy from the University of Berlin in 1931. She was also a poet, whose splendid dissertation was a study of the Eddas, Icelandic political verse of the Middle Ages, which involved translation from Old Norse. In addition to her work as headmistress, she taught Greek, Latin, German, French, Hebrew, ancient history, and the Bible. ER sent her entire file to Sumner Welles, her only State Department friend, and promised Dr. MacCracken that she would ask them “to do all they can to help her.” ER’s last note on the subject, dated 11 September 1939, contained one sentence: “Dear Sumner: Thank you so much for what you are doing to help Dr. Vera Lachmann.”
That same day ER wrote her daughter, “I feel sick about the war & want so much to do something that looks beyond toward building a better peace. We can’t go on with ever recurring wars in a modern world.” She wanted especially to go to Europe to build a significant “refugee relief effort,” but all her suggestions were rejected.
Dr. Lachmann—a great and beloved teacher, an inspiration for so many, the Marie Souvestre of Berlin—was one life endangered in a world of lives in jeopardy. ER did what she could, one life at a time. In this case her effort was successful. The visa was granted, and on 16 November 1939 Vera Lachmann left Germany for New York, via Denmark and Sweden, where she boarded the Gripsholm for a twelve-day journey to her new life. ER could not foresee that over time Vera Lachmann would become a legendary American classicist, charismatic and inspirational, or that students around the country would sing her praises long after her death in 1985.*
• • •
ER prepared for the end of her beach vacation in a serene and contented mood. She wondered where the next battle would occur, and when it would begin; and she wondered how long it would take for Americans to heed the crisis. But her grand vacation had gone a long way to restoring her spirits: “Another heavenly day and I grieve my time here draws to an end.” On one of her last evenings, she enjoyed a perfectly frivolous Florida adventure, going off, with unnamed others, to the Royal Palm Club. “It is very attractive and there is excellent food and one of the best floor shows.” Tony Martin sang, the ladies of the chorus were most charming and “graceful and wear attractive costumes.” Martin was introduced to her, and wanted his picture taken “with our group.” ER entirely enjoyed the “spirit of carefree gaiety here which is contagious.”
Finally “the day has come to leave Florida and I am afraid this lazy life is going to be hard to shake off. I have discovered that there is much in a change of atmosphere. I imagine that the President most reluctantly neared his home port.” But he had already picked up the “threads of all state affairs,” and she was certain that when she flew into Washington “this evening I shall forget in the twinkling of an eye that there are such things as days which are not scheduled and hours when one can lie in the sun or sit and read a book. It has been a delightful holiday and I feel a deep sense of gratitude to the kindly people who were so considerate and allowed me such freedom.”
As she considered her return to state affairs, ER made two suggestions to her readers. Former president Herbert Hoover had proposed that the U.S. government donate $20 million for Polish relief, because when the war was over, all Europe “will be starving.” She ag
reed and wrote, “Unfortunately, it is always the little people who starve. They are starving now,” if not in Finland, where food was bountiful, certainly in Poland and probably in Germany, Spain, and Italy, and to some degree “even in France and England.” She urged her readers to heed Hoover’s appeal and also to support Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s crusade to encourage schoolchildren in every state “to share what they can with the children who are in want in other countries.”
Tommy had arranged for ER to stop in and visit Lape and Read in Connecticut—“so you can see for yourself that she is brown and rested,” she explained to Lape—but ER insisted upon being on “a very strenuous diet and I hope she wont stay on it too long because she works too hard.” Few of ER’s friends satisfied Tommy, a fierce mother-bear protector. Critical and acerbic, she distrusted almost everybody ER befriended and felt close only to Esther and Elizabeth. Regarding their time in Florida, she had mixed emotions:
I would not have had any personal satisfaction . . . if I were in her place, but then we are all constituted differently. Such unadulterated selfishness as I observed could hardly be matched, and an equal amount of what I would call unkindness and thoughtlessness, if not worse. I had a certain amount of rest—that is I worked every morning and loafed in the afternoons and evenings. However, it was not my idea of a vacation.
Tommy’s reference was to Earl Miller, who was unexpectedly accompanied by his new lady friend Simone von Haver.
ER returned to the White House in time to greet special guests who had converged for the anniversary of FDR’s inauguration. She enjoyed a breakfast reunion with the first family’s most steadfast friends, including Grace Howe, Louis Howe’s widow; Groton’s headmaster, Endicott Peabody, and his wife; and FDR’s mother. To celebrate, they attended a service at St. John’s Church, where a prayer impressed ER so deeply, she printed it in full in her column:
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