Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Least of all did she support limiting compulsory service to “the jobless and needy.” It would be “all wrong” to place “the needy in a class by themselves” and regard them “in any way different from . . . other citizens of the Republic.” It would be cruel and punitive, the establishment of a new “class” servitude: “any plan of national training should be for all or none.”

  When a New Jersey relief director issued an order to deny assistance “to unmarried men of military age in order to force them into the Army,” ER condemned it as a “class ruling” that connected “poverty with military service.” It was “arbitrary, undemocratic and coercive.” It had nothing to do with the fair universal service that she supported.

  • • •

  France had been the refuge and hope of those in flight from Nazi rule in the rest of Europe: political activists and Jews, antifascist artists, poets, scholars, scientists, attorneys, workers, and farmers. In May a shocking decree had ordered “all foreigners living in France” to be interned in detention camps. Then on 14 June Nazi troops marched into Paris. That evening ER “sat out on the south porch” of the White House with Martha Gellhorn. Their eyes fixed on the Washington Monument, the two friends spoke “as everybody else does today of the world in which we find ourselves.” Gellhorn, like other writers the first lady knew, seemed to appreciate the ambivalent feelings of America’s youth. Adults continued to hope that youth “will always feel that war is a horrible thing,” but in the current situation in Europe, one had to “accept force as a weapon,” unless one surrendered to brutality.

  Alone that night, ER read every word of every newspaper and bulletin in the White House. Chaos and carnage threatened Paris, a city she particularly loved and associated with carefree splendid moments: her happiest days with Marie Souvestre; alone sightseeing as an adolescent; with FDR after the first war’s end; the places they went to heal the hardest days of their love-torn marriage. She longed to be among those about to sail to support the refugees and the children. Unknown to her, Reynaud’s government had agreed to declare Paris “an open city,” not to be bombed and destroyed—but emptied and occupied. ER agreed with Anne O’Hare McCormick in the Times:

  It isn’t only the shock of the fall of Paris you feel in the marrow of your bones. . . . It is Europe cracking—and cracking over the head of the United States of America. Nowhere outside the war zone does the disaster cause such a jolt . . . , and no place in this country is so shaken as Washington.

  The spectacle of the “world’s best army” in forced retreat, with the industrial areas of France in the hands of the enemy, comes as a startling demonstration not of German strength but of Allied weakness. . . . The heroic fighting men of France fall back for lack of planes and tanks and guns. . . . As for us, it is literally true that at the moment the US can do no more in response to Reynaud’s desperate appeal—France’s cry of agony—than the President has ordered done. Like the Allies’ own effort . . . it is too little too late.

  Throughout Paris the tricolor was replaced by the swastika—atop public buildings, churches, the Louvre, the Opéra, Notre Dame, down the boulevards. The largest of all was strung across the Arc de Triomphe—where the flame for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier continued to burn.

  On 15 June the Maginot Line was broken to bits, and the French government left Tours in haste—for Bordeaux. On 16 June, Prime Minister Reynaud resigned and turned the government over to Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, who within a week signed an armistice with Hitler. The settlement Hitler imposed on France was harsh. ER was outraged: “The Germans have learned only bitterness and no wisdom from past history. They are exacting even more severe terms from their conquered enemies than were exacted of them.” To destroy another nation to ensure the ascendancy of one’s own, she thought, was “a hopeless attitude if you have any faith” in the possibility of amity between nations, which in the end was the only “protection against future war.”

  All those who had previously fled Berlin, Vienna, and Prague for Paris were once again dislocated. Now there were fourteen million refugees on France’s roads. ER received appeals “from the women of France . . . begging the women of America to do all they can to assist them.” Their pleas were “heartrending when one can do so little. It must be stark anguish when these women receive the refugees from other places, knowing that their own fate may be similar in the course of the next few days, and realizing that their men may never return.”

  As she read the letters and news accounts, she considered what role she, the first lady of the only powerful democracy left in the world, might now play in a world everywhere endangered and clearly deranged. Above all, she wanted to be part of an aid operation. She envied Clare Boothe Luce, who had been in Europe, interviewed many, and seen for herself what was needed. Then she had written articles and a book to detail the truth.

  ER wanted to do all that and more. Since May she had been lobbying FDR and Norman Davis to permit her to join a rescue or refuge team. Surely her talents, her fluency in French, German, and Italian, her international friendships, and her administrative abilities would be useful. But FDR insisted it was impossible. She was too well known; she could be kidnapped, tortured, or killed. Moreover, he did not want her to go—she was needed at home.

  ER was disappointed and bitter. On 18 June, she wrote Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, “I’m not going abroad, nor am I going to do anything else except to hold people’s hands now and then. Well, I’m probably good at that!”

  Tommy worried about ER’s unusual discontent: “She has wanted desperately to be given something really concrete and worthwhile to do in the emergency and no one has found anything for her,” she wrote to Anna confidentially.

  They are all afraid of political implications, etc., and I think she is discouraged and a bit annoyed. . . . She works like Hell all the time and we are busier than ever, but I know you can understand that she wants to feel she is doing something worthwhile and it makes me mad, because she has so much organizing and executive ability she could do a swell job on anything she undertook.

  I would never dream of speaking to your father about her being discouraged because I have never done anything like that and I would hate to bother him when he has so much on his mind, and I would not trust Harry Hopkins . . . because he might let her know that I had done so, and that would upset her. [Harry and Missy were allied on] the other side of the house. It makes me mad and ready to smack him because your mother was so darn faithful about going to see him when he was sick, agreeing to take Diana, etc.

  Tommy appealed to Anna to invite ER to Seattle during the summer. “She would probably dismember me if she knew I wrote this to you, but I know you are about the only one to whom I could write.” Tommy hated to see ER so upset “and I feel powerless to do anything about it.”

  Never one to cave in to depression, ER persevered and kept herself engaged. She traveled between New York and Washington, cared for her aging relatives, went to meetings, wrote her columns, and called for action.

  She and the novelist Pearl S. Buck opened a drive for medical aid to China. The press reported that, “dressed in a pink-and-black print jacket dress and a black baku hat with pink flowers,” ER spoke in tribute to the women of China for “their bravery, courage and perseverance through three long years of invasion.” In her column, she pointed out that “women in every country are being forced to show qualities of heroism and endurance which in recent years of civilization they have hardly been called upon to develop.”

  But this war had just begun, and the suffering continued to mount.

  Chapter Twelve

  “The World Rightly Belongs to Those Who Really Care”: The Convention of 1940

  ER felt the tragedy of France’s collapse to the Nazis to the very core of her being. The “debacle,” as the French called it, challenged her precepts. What would become of all the people fleeing from so many places on the road to somewhere? W
hat would happen to the world of travel, freedom, and culture that Aunt Dora and the entire family had known and loved? Dora Forbes, who had left her beloved home in Paris so reluctantly in November, took to her bed after France signed the vicious armistice with Germany. How long would it be before Hitler attacked again?

  More than ten thousand French women and children were sent to camps like Gurs in the Pyrenees, including Hannah Arendt, the painter Charlotte Salomon, and Gerda Lerner’s artist mother, Ili Kronstein. Camps that had initially been opened for Spanish Civil War refugees and still housed 150,000 veterans were now further filled with people in flight from Berlin, Vienna, and all the fallen nations. With the City of Lights occupied by the Nazis, there was too much to do simply to mourn, yet mourning was in order.

  The president’s failure to confront the isolationists in his own cabinet, and his refusal to further extend and protect the New Deal, had left some leading liberals like Interior Secretary Ickes in despair: “I have been tired and nervous before but never have I been so close to the verge of a breakdown,” he wrote in his diary on 12 June. “It looks to me as if the President were throwing away everything that we have gained during the past seven years.” Moreover, FDR seemed contemptuous of his closest advisers: “At the White House comment is being made upon the bad state of his temper . . . and those closest to him, including ‘Missy,’ do not know what is running in his mind. . . . Apparently he is taking absolutely nobody into his confidence. He has promised a dozen people that he would get rid of [Secretary of War Harry] Woodring, but he makes no move.”*

  But after the fall of France, FDR, who hated to confront anybody, purged his cabinet of those who refused to aid Britain. Colonel Frank Knox, Alf Landon’s running mate in 1936 and the much-admired publisher of the Chicago Daily News, would replace Charles Edison as secretary of the navy. And Henry Stimson, a Republican internationalist who had been Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state, would succeed Woodring as secretary of war. In recent weeks, Knox and Stimson had both called for resumption of a draft, providing “unstinting aid” to Britain, and repealing the Neutrality Act. In step with rapidly changing public opinion, their commitment to national defense and U.S. military support against Hitler had a powerful influence on the presidential race of 1940.

  FDR announced the two replacements, on behalf of bipartisan unity, as Republicans gathered to nominate a presidential candidate in Philadelphia on June 24. His timing not only upstaged the convention but actually isolated the isolationists. Congressional pacifists and isolationists immediately attacked the appointments of Knox and Stimson and decried FDR’s new “war cabinet.” But Ickes hailed FDR’s appointments as a great victory for sanity. Even though he had a secret ambition to become secretary of war, he recognized the excellent wisdom of the Stimson appointment. “As to Frank Knox, I had suggested him originally [and] at once wired the President to say that he could not have selected two better men.” FDR’s reshuffling of his cabinet relieved ER, who shared Ickes’s enthusiasm for FDR’s renewed fighting mood.

  With most of the European continent tethered to Nazi rule, the Reich announced plans for a “new order”: Britain would be blockaded and destroyed. The “new Europe,” as Nazi advances continued, “would be Judenrein, Jew free.”

  Paul Reynaud, Édouard Daladier, and thirty parliamentarians who had left France to fight from North Africa were arrested in Casablanca. Vichy was now fully allied with Hitler. In fact, Pétain’s government pronounced Britain the primary enemy. Britain was preparing for an imminent Nazi attack. The only hope left was immediate U.S. intervention of some kind. How long could the British survive without it?

  Neither Churchill nor FDR wanted to see France’s powerful fleet fall into Nazi hands. In late June Churchill and his cabinet formulated Operation Catapult. In Oran, Algeria, and in other Mediterranean ports, Churchill presented the French fleet commanders with stark alternatives: they could bring the ships to British harbors; demilitarize or sink them; sail them to the United States; or do nothing, and the Royal Navy would destroy them. FDR supported this plan.

  Negotiations proved futile, and on 3 July heavy British bombardment destroyed most of the French fleet. Nazi propagandists called Churchill “the greatest criminal in history,” and condemned the attack as a “most disgraceful act.” The next day Churchill addressed Parliament to explain why he could not have allowed the French fleet to pass into Hitler’s hands and inflict “mortal injury” upon Britain. His short speech was much needed, since the bombardment had killed more than a thousand French sailors, to Britain’s shock and grief. “We may find ourselves actually at war with France,” Harold Nicolson wrote, “which would almost break my heart. The House is at first saddened by this odious attack but is fortified by Winston’s speech. [It ended] in an ovation, with Winston sitting there with tears pouring down his cheeks.” Britain was ready and resolute. There would be no surrender. It would be a long war.

  • • •

  An extraordinary wave of anti-Communist and anti-alien bigotry and violence emerged in the United States in the spring of 1940. The Dies Committee’s attack on Communist and left-leaning groups had resulted in Red Squad raids on Communist Party headquarters in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Baltimore. Many condemned the predawn raids and seizure of files and papers as a “conspiracy to violate the Bill of Rights.” Photographs of a Milwaukee raid showing over a dozen “Spanish Civil War vets and their supporters handcuffed and in chains” were published to much outrage.

  The bigotry culminated in passage of the Alien Registration Act. This notorious sedition law, popularly known as the Smith Act, ended civil liberties, including freedom of speech, press, and assembly, for aliens and dissenters. It required all aliens—adult noncitizen residents—to register and be fingerprinted by the federal government, or face deportation. Anyone who had ever belonged to any organization that advocated “the violent overthrow of the government” could now be deported. It imposed a $10,000 fine and ten years in prison for anyone convicted of “attempting to undermine the morale of the armed forces,” or anyone who “advocates, abets, advises, or teaches” the violent overthrow of the government, including anyone who joined or was associated with a group that did so, or published or distributed printed matter to advocate that overthrow.

  The bill had been introduced by Congressman Howard Smith (D-VA), the powerful chair of the House Rules Committee who in 1939 had launched an anti-labor investigation of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and a general assault on Communist influence—although fascist and Nazi groups seemed not to disturb him. His bill passed the Senate by voice vote on 15 June, and the House on 22 June, by a vote of 382 to 4. FDR signed it into law on 28 June.

  Sweeping and incoherent, dangerous and un-American, the Smith Act appalled ER. Representing the virulent march of hatred and hysteria, it threatened the right to disagree—the very essence of American democracy. She wrote a column of protest, to be published on the day FDR signed the law: “Something curious is happening to us in this country and I think it is time we stopped and took stock of ourselves. Are we going to be swept away from our traditional attitude toward civil liberties by hysteria about ‘Fifth Columnists’?” She agreed with the attorney general that the Smith Act was “dangerous” and extreme, an “historic departure” from America’s best practices and traditions.

  Even more extreme, ER wrote, “a leader of great prominence in Catholic Youth, Boy Scouts and Boys Club of America” advocated immediate suspension of all civil liberties for Communists, and especially the Communist elements of the AYC. Roundups and imprisonment were in order for “these birds [who are all] saboteurs.”

  In the wake of the passage of the Smith Act, anti-Red hysteria mounted. Fifteen states, including New York, ruled the Communist Party off the ballot. Local vigilantes and police harassed petitioners going door to door to collect signatures for party nominees. More than three hundred electoral canvassers were ar
rested and charged with various crimes, including “criminal syndicalism in Illinois and Oklahoma,” and “robbery, assault, housebreaking, and disturbing the peace” elsewhere, according to historian Ellen Schrecker. Fines were exorbitant, “and most of the defendants were convicted” and imprisoned.

  Very soon after the Smith Act was passed, the Supreme Court heard the case of two Pennsylvania schoolchildren who were Jehovah’s Witnesses: they had refused to salute the flag, because their religious group regarded it as an act of idolatry and a violation of their religious freedom. The Court’s majority issued a decision requiring that all schoolchildren be compelled to pledge allegiance to the flag. The Supreme Court thereby supported a ritual of state against religious liberty. “We live by symbols,” it read. “The flag is the symbol of our national unity, transcending all internal differences.”

  The decision bewildered and dismayed liberals in FDR’s cabinet. “And to think,” Harold Ickes wrote in his diary, “Felix Frankfurter wrote that opinion!” But their bewilderment turned to outrage as the decision unleashed a wave of violence against Jehovah’s Witnesses. Throughout the country, from Maine to California, communities rioted against people who refused to salute the flag for religious reasons. In Maine, a child was wounded in a riot after a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to salute the flag, and the governor threatened to call out the National Guard. In Wyoming, crowds forced Jehovah’s Witnesses to march with the flag. Six people “were dragged from their homes and forced to pledge allegiance.” In Illinois sixty-one Jehovah’s Witnesses were jailed for “safe-keeping” when their neighbors attacked them and burned their cars.

  Attorney General Jackson told Ickes, “People are breaking into other people’s houses and confronting them with a flag demanding that they salute it.” Both men were astonished by “the hysteria that is sweeping the country against aliens and fifth columnists” in response to the decision. Frankfurter’s former friends called it “Felix’s Fall of France Opinion.”