Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  The National Institute was a stirring, stimulating event. In part a tribute to Dewson, its key visionary, the event was unusually integrated. Many states sent biracial delegations, and Bethune chaired “a committee of Negro women who will welcome to Washington the Colored Delegates.” At all luncheons and dinners, “the delegations were seated by states and included the Colored Women.” Careful planning resulted in a harmonious event, with nobody insulted or excluded.

  ER had a grand time, and the event did much to ready policy for the party’s 1940 election platform. In the final session, the delegates named peace and jobs as their priorities. When ER took the podium, she cautioned the women to consider their resolutions carefully. “What will keep peace, what will serve the cause of more permanent peace?” Merely to “have peace tomorrow as we had it in 1918 will simply mean again a pause in preparation for another war.” Without economic security for everyone in every nation, more world trade, and “international law and order,” peace would remain an ideal far from reality.

  She suggested a three-point platform: peace, jobs, and health. Peace was “a beautiful idea,” to be vigorously “worked for.” Unemployment was a scourge that had to end, one that required the cooperation of business leaders and government. Public health was essential, as people suffered and died for lack of “a better health program . . . which shall be of value both to the medical profession and the people who at present are deprived of medical care.”

  The National Institute demonstrated ER’s conviction that change with respect and justice was possible. America’s official policies took no account of racial injustice, brutality toward the disenfranchised, and economic disparity, therefore she increasingly publicized the SCHW’s campaign to end the poll tax, an unjust tax levy that systematically disenfranchised black, poor, and women voters. In the South, she reminded her readers, only one-third of the electorate voted.

  In a Q&A column in the Democratic Digest, she featured her friend Virginia Durr’s question from Birmingham, Alabama: “Do you think the poll tax prevents the working of democracy?” ER replied, “I think the poll tax anywhere is apt to discourage participation in government of men and women with small means and when any of our citizens do not fulfill their obligations by voting, they are apt to neglect their obligation to study candidates and policies. . . . This is very serious because it puts the government of the country in the hands of a few instead of the hands of the people as a whole.”

  Often now in her daily column she referred to racial issues. “I would like to tell you about Karamu House in Cleveland, Ohio, founded 25 years ago by Russell and Rowena Jelliffe. . . . Their objective is to further ‘the more complete functioning of the American Negro in the democratic life of the community and the nation [particularly] through the field of the arts.’” Karamu House included “the most outstanding Negro little theatre in the country,” having produced over 160 plays. The work of its artists and craftsmen was widely seen in museums and galleries.

  • • •

  On 7 May, Hitler issued an ultimatum to the Netherlands and Belgium that caused FDR’s cabinet to expect war within hours. “One cannot help but have an anxious feeling about Holland,” ER wrote in her column:

  Last evening, at our table, there was much talk of old wars and new wars, history already written and history in the waiting. When all is said and done, and statesmen discuss the future . . . the fact remains that the people fight these wars. I wonder that the time does not come, when young men facing each other with intent to kill, do not suddenly think of their homes and loved ones and, realizing that those on the other side must have the same thoughts, throw away their weapons of mass murder.

  In Britain, members of Parliament were demanding that Neville Chamberlain resign as prime minister. Why had England failed to bomb known German munitions plants in the Ruhr and the Schwarzwald? they asked. The call went up: Go! Go! Go! On 7 May one of Chamberlain’s closest friends, Leo Amery, a staunch Conservative ally for over twenty years, delivered a “terrific attack,” which he concluded by quoting Oliver Cromwell’s 1653 words to the Long Parliament: “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” That evening Chamberlain announced his resignation. An all-party unity government was formed, led by Winston Churchill, who was now both prime minister and minister of defense.

  On 8 May, the Nazi invasion imminent, FDR reiterated his offer of refuge for the royal families of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. At dawn on Friday, 10 May, the Nazis bombed airfields in Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and France. They quickly occupied Luxembourg, and German forces parachuted into the Netherlands: Rotterdam, Leiden, and The Hague. They bombed Brussels and the nearby French city of Nancy. In Norway, Britain continued to hold Narvik, and the Royal Navy sank eight German destroyers, but it was no match for Nazi air power.

  ER, while driving to the Choate School to address an assembly, listened on the radio as news of the Nazi invasions of Holland and Belgium was broadcast, with rumors of bombings of Lyons, Orleans, even Paris and towns in Switzerland. At noon she faced the young Choate boys in the chapel and wondered somberly about, “All these young things, knowing so little of life and so little of what the future might hold!” Youth faced a “cruel world,” filled with uncertainty and terror.

  “Altogether,” ER wrote, “my mail these days is pretty heartrending.” In her column, she gave examples of the many urgent requests she received. A family of Ukrainian-Americans could neither find nor reach refugees from “what was once their country.” Hyde Park neighbors sought information “about their closest relatives in Norway, from whom they heard nothing since the war engulfed their country.”

  In early May ER had suggested to FDR that British, French, and Dutch Guiana be developed as havens for refugees. FDR replied that the climate and topography of these South American colonies were “so vile that it would cost huge sums to make life there inhabitable for white people.” He was willing to study some kind of “Pan American trusteeship” in the “remote possibility that the American Republics may be forced to do something about European possession in this Hemisphere. I think it is best not to discuss this out loud, however.”

  ER longed to do “something worthwhile,” she wrote to Hick on 11 May, and particularly hoped to travel to war-ravaged cities to work with refugees. She had spoken to FDR about her wish and scheduled a meeting with Red Cross director Norman Davis for the next day. She and Davis joined the president for lunch aboard the Potomac. FDR, the first lady noted in her column, wanted to discuss the Red Cross’s nationwide appeal to “alleviate human suffering . . . throughout the world.” She hoped every American would respond “to the extent of their ability.”

  She continued to seek out like-minded individuals and gather them around her. Her friendship with Lash intensified at this time in part because he and his friends supported the victims of Nazi atrocities, organized rescue missions for refugees, and defended civil liberties in wartime. As the situation in Europe worsened, Lash and his circle became increasingly important to her.

  In mid-May, Frank Kingdon’s Save the Children Federation received a radiogram to help 200,000 Belgian and Dutch refugee children find homes in France and Britain. ER was a sponsor of Kingdon’s International Child Service Committee and also a vice president of the Non-Sectarian Foundation for Refugee Children, which had sought since 1938 to find shelter in American homes. Now a reported five million refugees from Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg were on the roads into France.

  ER also worked closely on refugee matters with writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who had founded the Children’s Crusade for Children, which asked schoolchildren to collect pennies for children in China, Poland, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Finland, and Norway. By May 1940 there were Children’s Crusade drives in 250,000 U.S. schools. According to Time, 150 “moppets” in the Bronx Orphanage for Colored Children contributed a penny fo
r each year of their age, from five to sixteen. ER agreed to chair the Children’s Crusade, and FDR said, “Every child in America ought to feel vividly the suffering and loneliness experienced by the children who are victims of racial and religious intolerance.”

  While there was much dismay, there were also rays of hope. She had received a book of poetry by H. Nelson Hooven, called The Laughing One. One poem pleased her, and she wondered if her readers would agree that the poet was correct: “Darkness is only a shadow on the ground. / Behind us lie the things we have fashioned. / Before us, ever, an invitation to beauty.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “If Democracy Is to Survive, It Must Be Because It Meets the Needs of the People”

  On 13 May, Winston Churchill addressed Parliament to announce the policy of his new government: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” Our intention “is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.”

  The next day Hitler ordered a massive bombing of Rotterdam to break Holland’s unexpected resistance. The Luftwaffe dropped thousands of 2,200-pound bombs on the Dutch seaport, gutted the city center, destroyed bridges, and rendered eighty thousand people homeless. As civilian deaths mounted, the carnage and destruction were compared to that of Guernica and Madrid in the Spanish Civil War.

  On 15 May, as Nazi forces continued to smash through Belgium and Holland, ER spoke at City College, New York’s first free public university, founded in 1847. She invited Joe Lash to accompany her, since it was his alma mater. “It must be a most exhilarating thing to teach in a college of this kind,” she wrote, pleased by her enthusiastic and diverse audience. “One of the faculty told me that there never was any dearth of conversation. I can well imagine that, for I am sure that every type of thinking is present because every type of background is there.”

  As she left the campus, a group of students at the gates shouted at her, “The Yanks are not coming!” Mystified by their ignorance of world danger, she replied, “But what if the Nazis are?” In her column, she noted, “My heart sank. Poor youngsters, they have the same desire we all have to live in a civilized world and yet are obliged to face, as we all must, the impact of [those determined] to wipe out what we have called civilization.”

  Churchill, in his first telegram to FDR as prime minister, explained, “The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood.” Britain fully expected “to be attacked . . . in the near future,” he said, not only by Germany but by Italy, as Mussolini was eager “to share the loot of civilization.” For its very survival, he said, Britain needed “40 or 50 of your older destroyers . . . several hundred of the latest type of aircraft . . . anti-aircraft equipment and ammunition . . . [iron] ore and steel.” Finally, he noted, “I am looking to you to keep that Japanese dog quiet in the Pacific, using Singapore in any way convenient.”

  By the time FDR cabled his reply, the Netherlands had surrendered to the Nazis. The president advised Churchill that destroyers were impossible because a loan or gift would require congressional authorization. However, he was making every effort to speed up production of the latest aircraft and other military essentials. Regarding Japan, the U.S. fleet would remain “concentrated” in Hawaii “for the time being.”

  On 16 May, FDR addressed a joint session of Congress to describe the crisis and detail the needs of the nation and the Allies. He requested appropriations to increase production of new aircraft from six thousand to fifty thousand a year. All military equipment for land, sea, and air would be upgraded and modernized. Harold Ickes and other liberals in his cabinet worried about war profiteering, and the return of corporate greed and control to American political life, but the enthusiastic congressional reception to FDR’s speech came as a relief. The president’s “magnificent” address, Ickes said, “had the finest reception” from the bitterly divided Congress in “five or six years.”

  ER, proud of her husband’s vigorous presentation, fully supported his purpose. She had spent the day at the Madeira School in Virginia, where the girls asked “far more personal questions” than had the boys at Choate. But the questions all reflected the issue “in all our minds today, namely, personal responsibility in a democracy.” Americans who read the news must realize “this is a crucial moment for the world.” The president’s request for “a great increase in our national defenses” was vital to America’s survival.

  Still, for ER, national defense went beyond modern weapons: America’s future depended on fortified and expanded New Deal efforts. “If democracy is to survive,” she wrote, “it must be because it meets the needs of the people.” So long as so many people live in poverty and distress, the survival of one form of government is “immaterial.” For the survival of democracy, “we need a united front regarding economic betterment, as well as the more tangible front of creating war materials. It requires greater cooperation and it will require greater self-sacrifice really to make democracy something for which every citizen will feel” ready to fight, and to die for—the survival of “economic as well as intellectual freedom.”

  Urging Congress to authorize the defense funds the president sought, she argued that “a nation of healthy, strong, well-fed people who are decently sheltered, clothed and educated” would strengthen the national defense. Surgeon General Thomas Parran had said America’s health system should be considered “part of our national defense.” Unless they had good health care, Americans could not possess the necessary “toughness of moral and physical fibre.” After all, “the one-third of the nation, ill-fed, ill-housed and ill-clothed, is the most fertile ground for the seeds of dissension strewn so ably today by some of the world’s enemies.” Those denied “the decencies of life may be as serious a menace as a foreign invasion.”

  ER’s ongoing commitment to work across political differences in “united front” efforts set her apart from many New Deal liberals. Youth’s dissent, its interest in socialism and Communism, did not disturb her as much as the growth of “Gestapo methods,” alarmist calls for mass firings, roundups of “aliens” and refugees, renewed efforts at censorship and conformity, and threats to civil liberties and dissent. Indeed, she was among the last to accept the bitter reality that the Nazi-Soviet Pact had destroyed progressive alliances for education, racial justice, housing, health, and human betterment. Convinced that the pact could not possibly serve the Soviet Union and could not possibly last, she could not believe that her young friends refused to acknowledge that Nazism had to be resisted and military preparedness was essential. Americans were “facing a sinister power with no scruples,” she told a Washington church meeting on unemployment and relief. “Every time we are not united, every time word goes back to Germany that we do not mean what we say, we are nailing one more nail in our coffin,” for Germany has contempt “for diplomacy, and unresolve.”

  She was vigorous in support of her husband’s emergency defense program, devoting two columns that week to his speech. Yes, many protests and petitions from youth groups demanded jobs, “not wars for death.” But “one cannot live in a Utopia which prays for different conditions and ignores those which exist.”

  While U.S. factories increased military production, and planes and matériel were designated for England and France, Europe continued to crumble town by town under Hitler’s rolling tanks and relentless aerial bombardments. On 20 May German forces were triumphant on the Channel coast, capturing critical ports. Panic spread throughout France, Belgium, and Luxembourg. An estimated five million families fled the besieged areas with whatever they could carry on their backs, in their cars and trucks, or atop their wagons.

  From Paris, Ambassador William Bullitt cabled FDR, asking him to get Congress to vote $20 million “for the succor of these refugees.” It was urgent; people were dying every hour of neglect. They needed bandages a
nd iodine, wounds were open, children were crying. For many days, Bullitt cabled in a frenzy: please send help immediately.

  The Nazis took Boulogne and Calais by 26 May. Rumors spread that England was to be attacked; Kent and Sussex evacuated. In France, Paul Reynaud’s government rounded up Communists; the vigorous group of French appeasers spread wild rumors about a Communist takeover of Paris. The propertied classes had long preferred Hitler to their own socialist “popular front” governments and had previously rallied against “the Jew Prime Minister” Léon Blum with cries of “Better Hitler than Blum”; now they suspected a “compromise peace” with Nazi Germany would be preferable to a new Bolshevik menace. At the U.S. embassy, Robert Murphy and Ambassador Bullitt agreed and blamed all France’s troubles on the Communists.

  On 26 May, in a major radio address that went far beyond a Fireside Chat, FDR transported millions of Americans to the battlefields and villages of a hurt and wounded, utterly transformed reality. “My friends . . . Tonight over the once peaceful roads of Belgium and France millions are now moving, running from their homes to escape bombs and shells and fire and machine gunning, without shelter, and almost wholly without food. They stumble on, knowing not where the end of the road will be.” Every American family listening could help. The American Red Cross stood ready to rush food, clothing, and medical supplies to “these destitute civilian millions. Please—I beg you—please give according to your means to your nearest Red Cross chapter. . . . I ask this in the name of our common humanity. . . .

  “Together . . . you and I,” he continued, must “consider our own pressing problems. . . . There are many among us who in the past closed their eyes . . . to events abroad.” Some believed events in Europe were “none of our business.” Others believed the “many hundreds of miles of salt water made the American Hemisphere so remote” that we might continue undisturbed “in the midst of [our] vast resources without reference to, or danger from, the other continents of the world.” But all those who have “closed their eyes” or turned away from the “approaching storm” for whatever reason have now been awakened by the shattering events of the past two weeks. “I did not share those illusions,” FDR reassured his listeners. “I do not share these fears.”