FDR’s speech stirred audiences internationally, although at home ER was “saddened to notice that the applause came almost entirely from the Democrats.” She wrote in her column, “Surely all of us can be united in a foreign policy which seeks to aid those people who fight for freedom and, thereby, gives us the hope of present peace for ourselves and a future peace for the world founded on the four great principles enunciated today.”
Shortly before FDR’s third inauguration, ER’s efforts on behalf of rescue were evidently enhanced by a weekend visit from Thomas Mann and his family at the White House. Mann and his wife, Katia, had previously been guests at the White House during their 1935 U.S. visit, when Mann and Albert Einstein were honored at Harvard. In 1940 Mann participated in the ERC.
Mann’s children, writers Erika and Klaus, had left Germany together in April 1933. Klaus arranged for his friend W. H. Auden to marry his sister, whereby she became a British citizen. Although Auden and Erika Mann had never met, they were married in a civil ceremony in London surrounded by friends on 15 March 1935. Grateful to Auden, and to Britain, Erika spent much of the war as a journalist for the BBC. She and Klaus also embarked on a lecture tour throughout the United States, which featured conversations about her book of horrors regarding Nazi education, School for Barbarians, and her anti-Nazi cabaret The Pepper Mill. Their book Escape to Life was published at the time of ER’s 11 May 1939 White House luncheon for PEN’s international writers’ congress. There ER met Klaus and his friend Ernst Toller, and Erika arrived from London to accompany her parents. Erika had influenced the ERC’s founding—indeed, at the first meeting in June she had suggested having a rescue agent on site to represent the ERC’s lists.
“The Thomas Manns have been here since Sunday,” ER wrote Joe, “& I have enjoyed knowing them a little better.” She was particularly glad to see Erika.
Within weeks of the Mann family’s visit, Varian Fry reported a “sudden” and “enormous” change in the rescue process. He did not know the reason, but for the first time in five months, exit visas were available. All spring ships from Marseilles to the French colony of Martinique were filled with ERC clients. They carried notables such as Jacques Schiffrin, publisher of the Pléiade editions of the French classics, and many members of the German and Austrian underground. Fry noted it was “the busiest . . . most fruitful” time in ERC history. Katia Mann’s brother, the physicist Peter Pringsheim, was among those suddenly allowed to leave France legally, as were the artists Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, and Max Ernst.
ER was inexplicably involved in the circumstances of the rescue of Max Ernst, who left France in the company of Peggy Guggenheim. Max’s son Jimmy had left Berlin in 1933 and sailed for New York in 1938; he was now employed by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). On 12 November 1940, Alfred Barr of MoMA had sent the paperwork needed for visitors’ visas for Max and his ex-wife Lou. They were in immediate and extreme danger, Barr explained, because Max Ernst “has made no secret” of his contempt for totalitarian governments, and the “unrealistic nature of his work is . . . most actively persecuted. . . . His wife is Jewish. His son, James, is steadily employed in the Museum of Modern Art.” Lou—Dr. Luise Straus-Ernst, a scholar, journalist, author, and philosopher—did not travel with them: her son Jimmy always said that she had not been considered “important enough and fell through the cracks” of the paper mountain. She and Max had been separated for eighteen years, and perhaps for that reason she was unable to get an independent visa.
ER supported Max Ernst’s exit visa and evidently suggested the couple reunite, but nobody ever understood her suggestion or even why she had been consulted. On 21 April 1941 Varian Fry cabled the ERC in New York: “Eleanor right about Lou Ernst unable to pose as still Max’s wife.” Fry asked Hiram Bingham to meet the Ernsts at the consulate. There Max Ernst suggested they get remarried, but Lou rejected his offer: “Max, you know this is nonsense. . . . Jimmy will get me out. . . . I don’t like charades. . . . A life for a marriage license?” She thought it all unnecessary: “after all, I’m an optimist.” Jimmy continued his efforts to rescue his mother, and at the end of June 1941 she was promised a visa, “pending a definite sailing date.”
• • •
Just before FDR’s inaugural, the Roosevelts had a family reunion at Hyde Park. Happy to be with Anna and John, in from Seattle, as well as Franklin Jr. and Ethel and her grandchildren, ER rhapsodized, “It was wonderful to have two full days in the country. We walked and talked, ate too much, and slept too little; which is always the way of family reunions, for once conversation starts, time slips by unnoticed!”
There were also direct, even combative, political conversations. FDR had recently appointed Charles F. Palmer, an Atlanta real-estate man who had served as the defense commission’s building adviser, as the defense housing coordinator. ER asked if he would “be sensitive to problems of low-cost housing, schools and the like in defense areas.” Noted Lash:
The President became impatient. ER persisted and said she had heard that Palmer was partial to real estate people. Clearly very annoyed the president said alright he would appoint someone with Palmer to watch for those things. ER stuck to her guns. ‘Would he have any authority?’. . . Meanwhile, the president’s mother, noting the president’s mood, had gotten the butler to wheel up the president’s chair to the table.
SDR then removed her son “from a discussion that she saw did not please him. ER actually had become angry because the president would not be pinned down. The family all congratulated her on having stuck to her guns.”
All weekend ER continued to urge expanded efforts for affordable public housing for workers. As with her groundbreaking work for Arthurdale in 1934, her commitment to decent affordable housing was consistently on her agenda. FDR was so peeved by her insistence that he uncharacteristically told Harold Ickes about their ongoing spat:
The Mrs. came into my room yesterday morning before I was out of bed. She said, “Franklin, I have had a talk with Mr. Straus.” I queried her: “Which Mr. Straus?” She said, “Nathan Straus” [who told her] that in building his housing projects he never had any difficulty with labor because, before the contract was signed, he always required . . . an agreement with labor. He wanted to build the Army cantonments. “He said that he has not seen you for a month and his feelings are hurt. Can’t you give him just five minutes?”
I pulled myself up in bed and said [speaking firmly]: “No, I will not see him. And as for building the Army cantonments, they are going to be built by the Army.”
Straus, head of the Federal Housing Authority, was “the most unpopular man in the Administration,” Ickes noted, and could get no money from Congress. FDR had suggested that he needed a lobbyist and a popular “ex-Congressman” to represent him on the Hill.
For some reason, FDR gave Palmer remarkable power. This virtually unknown new man in this new job now presided over all defense housing. He was actually uninterested in building decent affordable housing, desperately needed by workers in the burgeoning defense industries, and Straus was out of the picture. Within weeks, ER took her protest to the public.
On 25 January, she addressed a large gathering of labor and civic leaders at the tenth annual meeting of the National Public Housing Conference at New York’s Hotel Roosevelt. Thousands of “industrial workers employed under the national defense program” required immediate support, ER insisted. Moreover “in the long run all housing is defense housing.” Ultimately, “if we are willing to defend our country, it is because we feel that the life we live is worth defending.” She was personally interested in “prefabricated housing,” which can “be put up and taken down to move to the next place.”
But the new emergency, ER explained, demanded more than housing: “schools and hospitals must be provided.” In Bremerton, Washington, for example, 2,500 children were without schools, and there were no plans to provide them. Wherever people lived, we had to build communit
ies where “children are going to be educated,” and the needs of the “future . . . well-being of the people who are going to be doing the work” were recognized as “essential to our defense. We have no right to ask them to sacrifice their home life.” To get these needs met, ER warned, “we are going to have to be a nuisance” and campaign for government and industry “to be fair to people all over the country.”
Still, affordable housing for workers was the primary theme of the conference. Gerard Swope (chair of New York’s Housing Authority), Lawrence Westbrook (of the Federal Works Administration), and Peter Flynn of the CIO called for new housing in every region to end the unacceptably long journeys workers had to make to newly opened plants, and all called for an end to demeaning slum conditions in industrial workplaces.
Time credited ER—“the Number 1 U.S. humanitarian”—for her clarity, which “put this [housing] bottleneck on this week’s front pages.” After all, the National Resources Planning Board estimated that the United States needed “2,500,000 new homes” across the country—even before the new defense plants are taken into account.
But FDR’s new appointee Charles Palmer saw no reason to worry about new affordable housing, declaring that “sociology was no part of his job, that over-crowding would remain the private builders’ opportunity.” He sent his assistant, another realtor, to Seattle to make a speech that infuriated ER’s allies: “There’s no need for more Government building . . . we have found . . . that idle ships can sometimes be converted into dormitories for single men. Also usable are summer resort cabins that sometimes lie idle for months.” And given high lumber prices, tents would cost less.
The argument between ER and FDR regarding Palmer actually represented an ongoing change in their partnership. In the past, she had gone to the public to argue on behalf of FDR’s New Deal programs—and to build public support for things a reluctant and divided Congress tried to hobble. Now, as FDR turned aside New Deal perspectives, ER increasingly went to the public to argue for her own version of what was right and essential. Every day reinforced her conviction that “the struggle for freedom today is the struggle for economic security.”
• • •
As FDR’s third term began, the divided White House, with its clearly established borders between his court and hers, was refortified. FDR worked mostly in the company of Harry Hopkins, while ER spent most of her time with her steadies—Tommy, Hick, Earl, and increasingly Joe. Indeed, according to Chief Usher J. B. West, by 1941 Joe and Hick were permanent White House guests. Although he exaggerated when he wrote they “never went home,” they had their own assigned rooms.
Usher Howell Crim thought Lash was the first lady’s “closest confidant.” He wrote, “The two would sit in his room talking until late at night; she’d step across the hall to say good morning before her breakfast, and to say good night after everyone had gone to bed. They often walked together around the sixteen acres of White House lawn, or down Washington streets.”
On one occasion, while ER was in New York City, the staff moved Joe from his second-floor bedroom because “Crown Princess Martha of Norway and her gentleman-in-waiting had arrived.” Joe moved up to the third floor so the gentleman might have his room. The next morning ER arrived on the overnight train at dawn. Nobody had told her of the changes, and her “first stop was . . . Joe’s room. As she usually did, she gave a little rap on the door and walked right in.” There, she shocked Princess Martha’s gentleman, “totally undressed.” ER was “mortified” and furious. She telephoned the usher’s office and in “her iciest tones” instructed: “Never, never move or change a guest . . . without first contacting me. The telephone operators can reach me wherever I might be.”
At first surprised by ER’s independence, Crim grew to appreciate her dedication to good works and to FDR’s needs. “In contrast to ER’s close relationship with friends, and her husband’s with his staff,” he said, “we never saw Eleanor and Franklin in the same room alone together. They had the most separate relationship I have ever seen between man and wife. And the most equal.” They met, “usually in the evenings,” with their secretaries. ER “always brought him a sheaf of papers, a bundle of ideas.” She campaigned “for her own projects and for liberal programs she favored,” and his concerns. She was “perhaps his most trusted observer,” and he routinely sent her out “to assess the feelings of the people on just about everything, including his own policy statements.”
Joe and Trude’s deepening love reignited and replenished her faith in the future. Together they planned an international student conference in July at Campobello, the Maine House that ER had agreed to sponsor. Joe and Trude also worked on their unfolding relationship, with ER’s steady support. Trude was reluctant to divorce Eliot Pratt and at one point she decided not to see Joe anymore. As she contemplated her future and changed her mind, she confided in the first lady.
In March, Trude joined ER for a ten-day vacation in Florida, which Earl Miller had arranged. Joe joined them for three days, but for ER the week was dominated by Trude. They walked along the beach and plunged into the ocean. “It is wonderful to be with [ER],” Trude wrote Joe. “She is so incredibly patient and understanding, and every hour I get more devoted to her—if that is possible.”
While in Florida, Tommy had a splendid time with her partner Henry Osthagen, but Earl was annoyed by ER’s new friends. He simply “did not like either of our guests,” Tommy observed. As always, ER chose to ignore the routine jealousies among her intimates. Her time at the beach with Trude and Earl reminded her of an earlier vacation with Earl and Hick. ER reminisced in a note to Hick: three-mile walks on the beach, deck tennis, good reading. Paderewski arrived for tea. “How old he has grown & how sad he is!”
• • •
But the global stage did not leave ER’s attention for long. In May, the State Department’s opposition to rescue efforts escalated. At the U.S. consulate, Hiram Bingham was replaced by an officer determined to block all visas. Then the State Department ordered Fry to leave. Eileen Fry appealed to ER, to no avail. “I am sorry that there is nothing I can do for your husband,” the first lady replied. “I think he will have to come home because he has done things which the government does not feel it can stand behind.” On 22 June 1941, the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the State Department issued new regulations that made it virtually impossible for refugees in Europe to get visas. All pending visas would expire on 1 July, and all U.S. consulates in German-occupied countries would be closed on 15 July. State warned Fry that he would be arrested if he did not leave.
He appealed for more time, but the consul explained that he had to go: Vichy officials and the State Department were united in agreement that he had provided “too much help to Jews and anti-Nazis.” But he did not leave until September, and the ERC continued to save lives for another year.
Frank Kingdon and the ERC kept ER informed about the hardships these new rules caused. Kingdon was outraged that visas were revoked, and he worried that all those in danger could “simply break down” after waiting months and months; “suicides will increase greatly.” Dr. Lou Straus-Ernst lost her visa, which Jimmy had worked so hard to secure. She fled to the mountains, where she would remain in hiding until 1944.
It was tragic. ER despised Breckinridge Long and could not understand her husband’s role. Couldn’t he have stopped Long? Why were her own allies defeated?
Meanwhile in London, despite Long’s opposition to his efforts, John Winant was an immediate success as ambassador. In contrast to Joseph Kennedy’s defeatist negativity, he and his staff were quickly perceived as friends of England, dedicated to the needs of the people, and Churchill trusted him.
Given this shift, ER resolved to be more involved in diplomatic efforts. In Washington she arranged a reception for Lord Halifax, a Conservative politician who had just been appointed ambassador to the United States. She invited Bernard Baruch, who had a long friendship with
Churchill. At the reception he told amusing stories of Anglo-American relations during the first war; the stories, according to Joe Lash, delighted the “tall, grave, almost funereal-looking man, dignity incarnate.” The evening was successful, launching a warm relationship between the Roosevelts and the new British ambassador and his wife.
In London, ER’s friends were completely involved in helping the war effort. In 1938, Lady Stella Reading had founded the remarkable Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS), now the Royal Voluntary Service (RVS), which set up emergency shelters and provided assistance to civilians in wartime. It was being built only slowly; Reading was finding it difficult to recruit volunteers. ER intended to change that, and “to stir the women as Lady Reading had done” and galvanize a movement immediately.
And her old Allenswood friends in London were taking in neighbors who were homeless from the Blitz. Lady Florence Willert told ER that her home “had been thrown open to all sorts of people,” to create a splendid “mood of democratic fellowship.”
ER’s closest school chum, Marjorie Bennett (Mrs. Philip Vaughn), encouraged ER to try to get the United States more involved in the war. Her sons’ lives depended “on America’s choice between honour and national egoism.” Bennett understood why a great democratic movement was under way, and that war produced “a totally different sense of values.” The Blitz made it clear that the era of greed and unbridled “self-interest” was over. Bennett hoped that isolationist feelings in the United States would change. “If we could only combine individual freedom with a genuine sense of responsibility. . . . Isolationism is impossible.”
One February day in FDR’s study, Harry Hopkins was dozing on a couch. “Suddenly he opened one eye” and said to FDR, “You know, Winston is much more left than you.” But the president and the prime minister were in agreement about war aims. Everyone in England was “convinced there is no turning back,” Lash recorded. “Hitler must be defeated whatever the cost in privilege. The British do not feel this must be stated explicitly. It is a sort of tacit understanding.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3 Page 48