Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  ER told the story of her childhood to all her close friends, and Joe Lash was her newest best friend. Not only was she pleased to spend more time with him, but she increasingly trusted his vision, enjoyed his conversation, and looked forward to his surprising connections. Lash and his friend Agnes Reynolds would be her guests at the White House later in the week, when FDR was scheduled to meet with fifty youth leaders from across the country. In fact, the first lady invited him to spend as much time as he liked at the White House and at Hyde Park.

  One reason for this invitation may have been the fact that Harry Hopkins had moved into the White House on 10 May 1940. After months of postsurgery recovery for stomach cancer, Hopkins had tried to return to work, collapsed, and could not return to his home. FDR, often lonely and always delighted by Hopkins’s wit, invited him to stay—which made sense, since ER had virtually adopted his daughter, Diana.*

  At first, ER imagined Hopkins would fill the role Louis Howe had once played and serve as a bridge between the first couple’s frequently competing courts. After all, she had championed Hopkins’s social justice activities and advanced his WPA efforts. They had once been close. But now he seemed more a turncoat than a friend. He was no longer interested in social reform and was critical of, even hostile to, her young friends. The issues that most engaged her now seemed of little or no importance to him. She distrusted him, disliked his new social friends, and deplored his lack of respect and consideration for such hardworking party leaders as Jim Farley. Moreover, as a key player in FDR’s court, he rudely excluded her from most urgent conversations about the war. FDR, Hopkins, and Missy LeHand conferred behind closed doors, leaving ER on the outside. Hopkins’s presence, unlike Howe’s, unsettled the competing Roosevelt courts, and actually exacerbated tensions between the president and the first lady.

  Upon her return to the capital from New York, ER was eager finally to ride her new horse, Charley. She hosted a reception for the Daughters of the Confederacy, had many meetings, and wrote a long letter to Anna:

  You are right that the world makes personal things seem unimportant. I think we must continue our normal lives, doing what we can as well as we can & preparing ourselves to face whatever the future holds. . . . Living here is very oppressive because Pa visualizes all the possibilities, as of course he must & you feel very impotent to help. What you think or feel seems of no use or value so I’d rather be away & let the important people make their plans & someday I suppose they will get around to telling us plain citizens if they want us to do anything. . . .

  Pa is working very hard, is worried and short-tempered but I think remarkably well all considered.

  I’m having a lot of young people (Youth Congress & other) to talk with Pa, Harry Hopkins & Sidney Hillman (CIO) so they will feel they have some share in knowledge of conditions & defense plans. They may not believe it is for defense but I think they should be given a chance to hear.

  • • •

  Despite ER’s irritation about being excluded, her views were heeded more than she knew. FDR had agreed to meet informally with a group of young people on 5 June, and to prepare for it, she had a long conversation with him about how young people might consider the future. They wanted jobs and faced not only insecurity and unemployment but discrimination. She worried about freedom of speech and freedom to protest. Why should young people rally to war? What was worth fighting for? ER asked. And what would it take to end the scourge of war?

  FDR was moved by his wife’s questions. They kept him up much of the night, he confided the next morning.

  On 5 June, the president, the first lady, their son Elliott, and Harry Hopkins greeted more than fifty young people who gathered in the State Dining Room. According to Lash, FDR took every question they asked, no matter how nasty. The questions focused largely on domestic issues, civil liberties, “Negro” voting rights, cuts in New Deal programs, the future of education, the WPA, and farmers. Some made speeches; others chided him as a new reactionary who “no longer cared” about progressive causes.

  FDR replied to each question with courtesy and interest. The State Dining Room “sparkled and danced with the President’s replies,” Lash recounted, impressed, but he wondered why the president bothered. He concluded that FDR liked young people and cared profoundly about their well-being. Like ER, the president was an educator who sought to persuade. It disturbed him that so many young people distrusted him and considered the New Deal over. It “grieved and worried” him that his call for fifty thousand planes and a policy of national defense had resulted in “an avalanche of telegrams,” mostly oppositional, from young people.

  The president explained that he was “conducting a two-front war—against Hitler and the dictators abroad and the reactionaries at home.” He found the young people’s dedication to “isolationism” mysterious. How could they fail to appreciate Europe’s slaughter and suffering? How could they remain aloof from America’s need to defend against “possible aggression”? He made it clear that he wanted their support.

  He was fighting “the evils of appeasement,” he explained, a pattern that had been long and wrong. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 were two cases when the international community had rejected sanctions. It continued with Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland—“anything to avoid a war.” It had taken over a year for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to acknowledge the dangers of the Neutrality Act. Even FDR’s “most ardent champions,” he said, had opposed his refusal to sell arms to Spain.

  The young people stared at him, unmoved and mostly unimpressed.

  He continued, “The Spanish War—where Congress acted not on the desire or policy of the administration, but because the League of Nations was afraid, afraid of war, a general European war.”

  The Communist students had been appalled by his inaction then but favored inaction now. ER might have winced at her husband’s wobbly rhetoric. But no one said anything.

  Unchallenged, FDR assured his audience that he had recited this “grim inventory” not “to assess blame” but to address the future. Young people faced a dreadful choice, and he was certain that if he were young himself, he would not care to live under Nazism or under Fascism. But the Allies would seek to create and ensure a world based on the Four Freedoms, “the indispensable pillars of peace—freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from an arms race (that is disarmament), and freedom for commercial and cultural interchange.”

  For another two hours, he sought to impress his audience. They said he had failed to do enough about health, jobs, education, civil rights, and housing. The president agreed with their domestic concerns but countered that he could do only what Congress and U.S. public opinion allowed him to do. “Remember this always,” he said: “85 per cent of the papers of the US are opposed to this administration—84 per cent because they regard the administration as being too damned radical, and 1 percent because . . . [it is] too conservative.”

  ER interjected that the young people failed to appreciate the need to build support for each issue, as well as the role played in a real democracy by public opinion. The president’s efforts were limited by people who had very different priorities and interests “as represented by Congress.”

  After almost three hours, FDR explained that he had to leave for a telephone conference with Secretary of State Hull, and he called on Harry Hopkins to answer “any more questions you have in mind.” It had been “a grand evening,” and FDR was rolled out to a standing ovation.

  Hopkins stressed that FDR had led the fight on progressive issues for seven years but understood the need for democratic support. ER interrupted to point out that FDR had been trying to persuade members of Congress for two years that urgent military defenses were needed. They had rejected his advice and laughed at his fears of impending war. Only now, after the Nazi assaults, did they “run to him” because the facts of world horror finally �
�have hit them in the face.” It was the same thing with other issues: only when the comfortable were pressed by a movement for change would they agree actually to make change.

  Harry Hopkins asked bluntly, “Don’t you people ever want to go home?” ER, irritated, announced she had to leave to catch a train. Somebody thanked the first lady for “this opportunity,” which she brushed aside. “The President was very much interested by you or he never would have stayed so long. You made your own opportunity.”

  • • •

  Absorbed by the unfolding calamities of Blitzkrieg and destruction, ER feared the agonies of the war would create discontent and confusion. “Every patriotic citizen is anxious to do something these days,” she observed in her column. “It is desperately hard to wait in inactivity,” she acknowledged, “when a battle costing thousands of human lives is going on across the sea and when things of great moment to the human race are hanging in the balance.” Mix philosophical perspective and action, she advised. Every citizen must decide “where we stand and what we are willing to do for our own country and other countries. These decisions are always hard.” She counseled: “Probably the best thing we can do is to go about our regular jobs, doing them as well as we can, improving them where we can, keeping as calm as possible and waiting until some definite plans are evolved where we can be of real value.”

  She took her own advice: she slept less and did more; she worked longer hours and took longer rides on her new horse. Mary McLeod Bethune, back at work in the National Youth Administration after eight weeks in the hospital, appealed to ER to consider “where the Negro people could function” best to help “the unfortunates in other countries” and take “a real part in national defense.”

  She visited a new craft center near Quantico, Virginia, with Elinor Morgenthau, where she saw splendid woven blankets and “some rather nice pieces of pottery.” A woman who demonstrated her spinning wheel told ER “she had carded and spun thousands of pounds of wool,” but since she “no longer had her own sheep the wool was not as good.” That amused ER, “for it sounded like my mother-in-law, who believes that only when a thing is produced on her own farm is it really good.”

  ER and Tommy motored to Connecticut to visit Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read at Salt Meadow, then to Boston to visit Anne and John and to meet her newest grandson, “always an exciting experience.” Her tenth grandchild, Haven Clark Roosevelt, had been named for his maternal grandfather.

  On 10 June, ER returned to Washington to hear that in France “the only reality is dead and dying human beings.” Overwhelming Nazi forces now surrounded France. The French argued about whether to fight or surrender, with Prime Minister Reynaud and Deputy Prime Minister Henri-Philippe Pétain on opposite sides.

  Italy had declared war on France and Britain, which particularly upset both ER and FDR. The president had been working behind the scenes to try to prevent Mussolini from entering the war, but all the messages that U.S. ambassador William Phillips conveyed to Il Duce had been to no avail.

  Italy’s entrance into the war changed FDR’s mood and strategies. The next day he was to give a commencement speech at the University of Virginia Law School, where their son Franklin Jr. was among the graduates. The speech would be resolutely anti-isolationist. Secretary of State Hull tried to persuade him to soften the tone, to omit a “stab in the back” reference to Italy. But ER agreed with FDR and approved of the speech—it represented both what he believed and what needed to be said. The first couple discussed it on the train to Charlottesville. “The times were fraught with promise of evil,” ER later reflected. “Franklin’s address was not just a commencement address; it was a speech to the nation on an event that had brought us one step nearer to total war.” It was broadcast live at six o’clock nationwide.

  Addressing the isolationists directly, FDR said it was a delusion to believe that the United States could be “a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force. . . . Such an island represents to me and to the overwhelming majority of Americans today a helpless nightmare of a people without freedom, the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.”

  In ten paragraphs, he detailed earnest negotiations between Italy and the United States to keep the “hostilities now raging in Europe” from spreading. Mussolini’s decision to fulfill his “promises to Germany” plunged Italy into “the suffering and devastation of war. . . . On this 10th day of June 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.”

  Stressing that U.S. material support abroad would be bolstered by a strengthening economy at home, he said, “We need not and we will not, in any way, abandon our continuing effort to make democracy work within our borders. We still insist on the need for vast improvements in our own social and economic life. But that is a component part of national defense itself.” In conclusion, he called for “effort, courage, sacrifice, devotion. Granting the love of freedom, all of these are possible.”

  FDR’s words were greeted by “the wildest applause, cheers and rebel yells.” The faculty on the dais, the 497 graduates and their families, “forgot academic decorum in spontaneous enthusiasm” for every reference FDR made to sympathy and support for Britain and France.

  ER devoted her column to her husband’s speech and its implications. “When the soldiers at Valley Forge wanted to go home, it was not only loyalty to George Washington which kept them suffering in the snow.” Rather, “deep down in their hearts they knew they could not live as free men unless they stuck it out, just as we will today if the need arises.”

  FDR’s speech made it clear that the era of neutrality was over. ER also understood that day that her husband would run for a third term, if nominated. Immediately after the speech, the Roosevelt party left for Washington, and ER went on to New York.

  As German forces marched toward Paris, the city’s residents fled. Prime Minister Reynaud telephoned Ambassador Bullitt with an urgent message for the president. France would continue to fight, but a public pledge that the United States “will give the Allies aid and material support by all means ‘short of an expeditionary force’ would mean a lot”—as would the actual delivery of such aid. Reynaud left this message, then he and his government fled Paris.

  On 11 June, Bullitt cabled FDR in a rare fury. Due to the evacuation of the city, France now had more than six million refugees, “whose lives can be saved only by American aid.” Three weeks earlier, the ambassador reminded FDR, he had promised to ask Congress for $20 million in aid. Then the Red Cross had held a drive and pledged to launch a ship filled with Red Cross supplies “within three days.” However, that promised ship had not yet left U.S. waters and was not expected to arrive in Europe until 30 June. Bullitt suggested that FDR find alternative aid structures or appoint a U.S. Navy admiral to the Red Cross. FDR replied simply that he was doing “everything possible” about the Red Cross shipment.

  • • •

  That month Senator Edward R. Burke (D-NE) and Representative James W. Wadsworth (R-NY) introduced legislation calling for a compulsory draft. The Burke-Wadsworth bill would conscript young men between twenty-one and thirty-five. The debate over conscription would rage throughout the summer of 1940. FDR at first distanced himself from the bill: with his eye on the election, he was wary of moving beyond public opinion. Ever the pragmatist, he nevertheless encouraged congressional testimony in favor of the legislation by Secretary of War Stimson and by Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall to rebut the isolationists and noninterventionists.

  ER, for her part, opposed compulsory military training. The nation was not yet ready for a military draft, she believed, and the creation of a large military force immediately suggested aggression and empire building: “We have never thought of ourselves as having frontiers to defend.” War, she still believed, “was the most stupid thing on eart
h,” the “worst of all ways” to adjust differences.

  But there were situations you could not live with: “Personally, I would rather be killed than submit . . . to certain types of restraints. I would resist and die rather than live under conditions which would be to me intolerable.” And national defense was built on many factors: learning, physical stamina, health education—all advantageous in both peace and war.

  Instead of a military draft as such, she proposed the creation of a universal draft of all Americans for community service. Young and old, males and females, should be trained not only in military defense but for service, public health and education, social work, farmwork, and forestry. Drafted women would be trained in areas useful for peace and war, both at home and in jobs. All citizens would contribute: “A national mobilization of all of us which gives all of us something to do, trains us so we fit, according to our capacity, into a [useful] place. It will make us better citizens and . . . our communities better places in which to live.” An expanded CCC and NYA would result in full employment and universal education. This “national muster” for unity and democracy would give everyone a job, so that “burdens and sacrifice would be equally shared . . . a mobilization of spirit and faith in democracy’s future.”

  With this proposal she sought to infuse the nation with a new “sense of national purpose” and end poverty. The country would benefit in many ways from attention to “self-discipline,” the “build up” and maintenance “of a good, strong physique,” the ability to “do things with our hands and to live and work with other people.” “We must consider the education and training of our youth an immediate goal. Until the need for universal military service was agreed upon,” she would “advocate universal training and [general] service to the country.”