Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Our Father, who hast set a restlessness in our hearts, and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find; forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life. Draw us from base content, and set our eyes on far-off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us, that we may be driven to Thee for strength. Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pity; make us sure of the goal we cannot see, and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us, and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try enough to understand them. Save us from ourselves, and show us a vision of a world made new. May Thy spirit of peace and illumination so enlighten our minds that all life shall glow with new meaning and new purpose; through Jesus Christ Our Lord.

  ER carried that prayer with her and made copies for her friends. Her quest for “the hidden good in the world” on the road to “a world made new” would fortify her every day as she confronted a springtime of horror, one lonely step at a time.

  Chapter Ten

  “When You Go to War, You Cease to Solve the Problems of Peace”: March–June 1940

  World events moved with staggering speed after ER’s return. As the Soviet-Finnish Winter War continued, Hitler warned that any Scandinavian support for Finland would result in immediate Nazi invasion, so Norway and Sweden maintained neutrality. They refused British and French troops cross-border access and blocked the transport of supplies into Finland. On 12 March, Finland, exhausted and unsupported, surrendered. The treaty was harsh, requiring Finland to transfer Karelia and Vyborg—a large city, all of whose inhabitants fled—and other essential territories between Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland. It ended the slaughter of the Winter War but left a bitter legacy.

  Soviet foreign minister Molotov estimated that Finland’s earlier failure to agree to the “small frontier rectification” that he had proposed had cost Finland 60,000 dead and 250,000 wounded; Russia 49,000 and 158,000 wounded. Most accounts, however, estimated Russian deaths at over 200,000, and it was considered a terrible price to pay for the illusion of Soviet security.

  Nobody knew where the next battles would be fought, but everybody knew they were imminent. In these tense months, ER determined to spend more time with her grandchildren and her friends. Being with those near and dear to her had always mattered, but now she began setting aside even more evenings for attending the theatre, concerts, and films. She needed to nourish her heart. Her sense of well-being would enable her to be of greater service and help save her sanity.

  Her columns became more political, more direct. Two short films shown at the White House, she wrote, should have wide commercial distribution. They described efforts in the windswept prairies and across mining regions not only to conserve nature but to protect mine workers and their families “from the dust which eventually give them silicosis and a predisposition to tuberculosis, from which they die at an early age.” People who “live in the shadow of great piles of waste which disintegrates and blows around in dust, so that the children are affected in precisely the same way as the workers in the mines,” require protection. “There must be ways of discovering methods of keeping this dust down in the mines. The living quarters of those families should be moved from the dangerous area.” ER wanted these films shown widely, to arouse public interest and “make it easier for the unions to obtain proper working and living conditions.”

  In another column, ER reported on the work of Leopold Stokowski, who had assembled a splendid orchestra comprised of NYA youth. Before he departed on a national tour, the great conductor said it represented “a musical awakening for the United States, and an international force for goodwill throughout the world.”

  Also during this spring of gloom, ER challenged herself by taking longer hikes and exercising more strenuously, and she agreed to engage in more controversial debates, write longer articles, and attend countless political meetings. Ilya Ehrenberg understood during his prolonged exile, as ships were sunk and cities bombed, that when one is happy, idle hours are tolerable, “but in misfortune, action, however futile, is a necessity.”

  In early March four hundred seniors at Fordham College, a Jesuit school, named Pope Pius XII the most popular man in the world and ER the most popular woman. “No other President’s wife has been so much a topic of conversation,” the New York Times noted. Since the AYC controversy, ER had risen in the public’s estimation: 68 percent approved of her activities, while 32 percent disapproved. Most Americans, regardless of party or class, agreed that the first lady “is a great lady doing good work” and sets “a good example for American women.” In fact, her approval rating was 4 percent higher than the president’s.

  At Easter, the paper of record rhapsodized about the first lady’s blue ensembles for the holiday, saying her outfits “not only gladden the hearts of all women, but in an entirely nonpartisan way harmonize with the spirit of our democracy.” The Times went on to explain that which ensemble she wore on Easter Sunday

  matters, one guesses, because the wife of an American President is not royalty and does not pretend to be; because she maintains her dignity without losing the common touch; because she seems to have established a sympathetic relationship not only with fashionable ladies who are to be seen on Fifth Avenue but with motherly persons in Middle Western kitchens wearing aprons [and] young wives in the Southern States, New England and the Pacific Coast.

  The Times praised her work as well as her choice of ensemble. Her “sympathies, basic attitudes, manners and interests” added “prestige” and bolstered “the institution of the President’s wife.”

  Inspired by such words, ER set off for a lengthy tour determined to speak bluntly about the need to confront the growing humanitarian crises worldwide. In the absence of government action, she urged private citizens to follow her activist example. In Philadelphia’s Kensington Nursery School, where toddlers would starve if their parents on relief did not get additional funds, she sponsored a foster care program. She helped to organize the Foster Parents Plan for War Children, which sent thousands of dollars to needy refugee children from Poland and Germany who were now in France. With the American Friends Service Committee, Clarence Pickett, Marshall Field, Caroline O’Day, and others, she helped organize a Non-Sectarian Foundation for Refugee Children, to place such children in American homes upon their arrival in the United States. The group, noted the Times, would cooperate “with Catholic, Protestant and Jewish refugee agencies [and] care for children eligible to enter under existing quota laws, but separated from their parents by reason of death, concentration camps or war conditions.”

  During the hectic six-week tour, ER and Tommy made stops throughout the Midwest, from St. Louis and Chicago to East Lansing and Kokomo. They visited college campuses, viewed NYA and WPA projects, lectured, and conferred with students, faculty, politicians, and activists. She was especially impressed with Michigan State College, which had taken full advantage of New Deal opportunities to build dormitories and impressive centers for music and sports.

  ER enjoyed much of her time away, she told her readers. As soon as she arrived at her hotel in Chicago, she got a call from her son Jimmy, who was in “on business” from Los Angeles, and so he “dined with us last night and breakfasted with us this morning. . . . This was a real joy.”

  ER’s commitment to the AYC continued to be tested. Although most of her friends, such as Aubrey Williams, no longer trusted the AYC leadership and advised her to end her support for its projects, she insisted they did valuable work, and she still cared about their causes. ER was “undaunted” by all the criticism she received about the AYC, according to Tommy: while many people in ER’s circle “are convinced that these youth leaders are really communists,” ER “intends going on with them.” In Chicago, ER met with Frances Williams, executive secretary of the AYC, which only fortified her unswerving support for its activities. Williams’s group, ER noted in her column, was doing splendid work: “These youngsters work hard
trying to build a worthwhile program . . . and I have a great respect for the unselfishness with which their work is done.”

  On 14 March ER delivered a major speech on civil liberties to the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee at the city’s opera house. It was part of a program to honor courageous journalists, sponsored by Chicago’s WPA writers, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Chicago Tribune. Nothing was more significant, ER emphasized, than the protection of civil liberties—freedom of speech, press, religion, conscience. These freedoms, “which emphasize the liberty of the individual,” needed to be protected at all times, particularly when people were in such profound disagreement. In this troubled world, nations at war could lose their freedoms quickly.

  Speaking personally and from the heart, she noted that her travels across America had given her the opportunity “to meet people and see things that have happened to little people,” which highlight our obligations in each community. Poor people, noncitizens, and minorities did not benefit from many aspects of the U.S. Constitution. It was up to individuals in every community to work for “the full observance for all our people of their civil liberties.”

  To dramatize the need, ER related a “story” concerning her visits to Arthurdale. “I happen to go every now and then to a certain mining community [where] there are a number of people who came to this country many years ago. They have been here so many years that they have no other country. This is their country. Their children have been born here. They work here. They have created great wealth for this country.” But they had no opportunity to learn the language or find out how to become citizens. Some time earlier ER had met a family headed by a woman who had been here over thirty-five years, a meeting she considered most important:

  I was standing with a group of people, and a young girl with arms full of packages came along the road. She stopped . . . and said, “Why, you are Mrs. Roosevelt. My mama say, ‘She is happy if you come to her house.’” [ER agreed to visit.] When I got to the house a Polish woman was sitting at the table. The girl walked in and said, “Mama, this is Mrs. Roosevelt,” and the woman got up and threw both arms around me, and I was kissed on both cheeks. She told me she had been expecting me to come for a long time. She wanted me to come because she wanted me to see how really nice her house was, and we went through the four rooms and it was nice. She had made crochet pieces which decorated every table. The bedspreads were [quilts] of real beauty. We admired everything together . . . [and] she wouldn’t let me leave without eating something.

  When ER returned six months later, she said, everything had changed. The home was dark and glum. The mine had closed down, and there was no work. The man worked for a time “on WPA . . . and then they tell me I no citizen. Mrs. Roosevelt, I vote. I vote often. Why I no citizen?” In the community, there was nobody he could ask for advice, no place to “find out what his rights were, or what he should do.” His children were citizens, but he was not. They were destitute and survived because the county allowed them to take in four old men.

  To ER it was simply unacceptable: “It hurt you. Something was wrong with the spirit of America that an injustice like that could happen to a man who, after all, worked hard and contributed to the wealth of the country. It should have been somebody’s business . . . to see that he learned the English language well enough to find things out for himself.” ER hoped to see a civil liberties committee in every community, a “group of people who really care when things go wrong and do something when there is an infringement of the individual’s rights.”

  The need to defend aliens was as great as the need to defend dissenters. Freedom of expression must apply to all. Americans had to be “willing to listen” and to speak with one another, to argue and debate. They had to trust one another in the process of democracy and majority rule. “Of course, that means that we have to have a real belief that people have intelligence enough to live in a democracy. And that is something which we are really testing out . . . because . . . we are the only great democracy that is at peace and [able to continue] a normal and free way of life. It is only here that people do not have to tremble when they say what they think.”

  She recommended Martha Gellhorn’s A Stricken Field, a “vivid picture of the kind of fear that has gradually come to all the people of Europe.” The novel depicts the horror that came to Czechoslovakia when anti-Nazi citizens were labeled dangerous and forced “underground,” to live “in hiding, afraid to speak to each other, afraid to recognize each other on the streets, for fear they would be tortured to death.” The message for ER was profound and urgent: “Only great fear could bring people to treat other people like that.” We must take heed that we do not follow such a path, and become “dominated by fear so that we curtail civil liberties.”

  She attacked “the growth of religious prejudice and race prejudice. [They] are a great menace because we find that in countries where civil liberties have been lost, religious and race prejudice have been rampant.” Some of the literature of hate and prejudice printed by “various denominations” had stunned her. Religious persecution and bigotry challenged our constitutional rights, she said. The core principle of religious freedom, that lay at the heart of the vision of our forefathers and was ratified by our Constitution, was the “right of all people to worship God as they saw fit, and if they do not wish to worship they were not forced to worship. That is a fundamental liberty.” We have people here from many nations, and “proof that people can understand each other and can live together amicably, and that races can live on an equal basis, even though they may be very different in background. . . . Above all, there should never be race prejudice” here; “there should never be a feeling that one strain is better than another.” After all, Indians are the only nonimmigrant inhabitants of the country “who have a right to say that they own this country.”

  She urged Americans to “have courage” and “not succumb to fears”—to be “a united country,” strongly committed to equality, civil liberties, and justice. Her faith in the younger generation was stronger than ever and she was especially grateful that we could “trust the youth of the nation to herald the real principles of democracy.”

  ER’s Chicago address, the keynote of her tour, was received with great enthusiasm. She went on to visit several schools and was particularly pleased to speak at the Teachers State College at Terre Haute, Indiana. Reflecting on the enthusiasm and dedication she encountered, she wrote: “No real teacher can ever stop learning. The only way that one can inspire youth is to keep on being enthusiastic and eager to learn also. That can only be done if one touches new subjects constantly and opens new windows of the mind and heart that give one a zest for living and keep one eternally young.” ER had loved her own teaching days at the Todhunter School. She was energized by her students, and they were inspired by her. She understood that teachers had the gift to transform young lives, and she always credited Marie Souvestre as the great guiding light in her life.

  Back in Washington, having witnessed successful schools on her tour, she was dismayed the next day when she visited the city’s underfunded public schools with a delegation of congressional wives. Even the school closest to the White House was unsanitary and heartbreaking: Children played “in a damp and fairly dark cellar room. . . . Even the tiniest tots have to go down into the cellar to reach the toilets. There is no auditorium, no gymnasium and in spite of years of [teachers’ efforts], a modern curriculum has not yet been adopted.”

  Moreover, health care across the country, she observed, was in crisis. Medical procedures and medicines to prevent deaths, which were particularly high among the poor, were not widely available. While in Chicago, she had been taken to a “small hospital on the lake where children with heart ailments are cared for. They have the capacity for one hundred children. . . . If they are given proper care, they almost always get well. If not, they die.” Everything about the place was exemplary: nutrition, care, management. “As I looked at
those youngsters, I felt grateful that so many people in Chicago had been moved to give them a chance to live useful and happy lives.” But the pediatrician in charge told her, “We can take a hundred, and we are the only institution caring for this type of case. There are approximately 10,000 children in Chicago needing this care.” ER was anguished that medical attention and treatments were limited to those who could afford them. In her columns she continually raised the issue: health care should be available to all.

  She planned to celebrate her thirty-fifth wedding anniversary with FDR on 17 March. “For the first time in some years [we are both] at home for our wedding anniversary,” she noted. “There is no special celebration, for we are rather an ancient married couple, but the President is going to see Gone with the Wind, which ought to be enough entertainment for any day in the year!”

  Alas, FDR was sick in bed and missed their anniversary movie date. Initially disappointed, even irate, ER soon appreciated that FDR’s nasty flu was serious. It was “swamp fever” or “jungle fever,” he told her and several journalists. He stayed in his room for almost ten days and failed to greet even visiting international dignitaries. When the president-elect of Costa Rica, Rafael Calderón Guardia, and his wife arrived for a formal tea, ER “greeted them under the front portico alone, for the President did not think it wise to go out of doors on the first day he has been out of his room.” She was “so sorry that the President had to disappoint the Easter Monday crowds on the lawn by not giving his usual few words of greeting over the radio from the South Portico.”

  It is unclear whether ER failed to realize how sick he was, or felt he unnecessarily pampered himself, or thought he should perform his tasks no matter his miseries. Since many of her notes to him end with advice that he get more rest and take good care of himself, several curious columns on FDR’s malaise seem uncommonly chiding. They are more reminiscent of her much earlier advice to a visiting grandson: if you have to cry, do so in the bathtub, with the door closed. Clearly she was in a dismal state of mind. In one column she noted that upon her return from New York, she walked into her sitting room to be greeted by “a huge vase of daffodils . . . and I felt my spirit, which had been somewhat low, rise like a rocket.” That afternoon, “I looked in on my husband [and] he looked really better . . . so that raised my spirits one point and the yellow daffodils did the rest.”