In March, ER traveled south for a stay at Bernard Baruch’s South Carolina estate, Hobcaw. “This is a beautiful place,” she wrote: “Acres and acres of marvellous trees & so quiet. Not pretentious just very comfortable living.” She did not refer to the nineteenth-century plantation life of Hobcaw, still steeped in lost-slave customs. She spent significant time with Baruch’s daughter Belle, who hosted the visit. She praised Belle’s skills with “her beautiful horses. She has schooled them herself and trained them so they obey her voice and are perfectly familiar with what she wishes them to do.” The magnificent horses jumped, riderless, at her simple words, cavorted and pranced to demonstrate “pure joy of living,” and “trotted up at the word of command” for their sugar reward. Belle “liked Eleanor Roosevelt and enjoyed her visit,” but we have no written record of ER’s reaction to the tall, intriguing lesbian baroness of Bellefield, as her property was known. Since ER would have no doubt been interested in Belle’s many happy years as an expat in Paris, ER’s silence about her is curious.
That spring Hitler’s onslaught continued: Nazi troops occupied Belgrade, bringing on the collapse of Yugoslavia, and suppressed resistance in Greece. General Erwin Rommel was victorious in the Middle East and in Libya, and Nazi U-boat blasts in the Atlantic sank countless merchant ships laden with supplies. While Congress dithered and even opposed convoys to protect U.S. supplies, FDR’s cabinet and associates urged decisive action. Belle Roosevelt, wife of FDR’s cousin Kermit, demanded to know why the president was so reluctant to educate the people: “Why don’t you tell [them] the facts, no matter how grim . . . ? Isn’t it part of your job to teach us to face the truth?”
The unbearable events made ER more determined to help transform public opinion—but also to find happiness in daily events. She told Joe Lash we must “snatch at beauty & joy & hug them close for hovering so near was hatred & ugliness, death & destruction.” She encouraged his romance with Trude and enjoyed their company, their letters, their phone calls. At one point, when she felt unsettled by tensions between them, she asked Trude if Joe was enough to fill her “empty heart.” The question revealed a good deal about ER, who was never alone but was often lonely. The ideal companionship she sought, the love that would have made such a companionship possible, had eluded her. Joe and Trude did much to fill the empty spaces in her heart. She told him that she understood his “mood of lonely despair” perfectly.
[You must] reach the point where you are sure of Trude. Time and trust in yourself is all that will bring that about. Sometime I am going to tell you just how lonely I can be in a crowd & it may help you to overcome the same type of thing which I’ve had to fight all my life. You don’t believe in others because you don’t believe in yourself. . . . We have to be preoccupied with “self” when we are young otherwise the world would come to an end! Every experience will help you & others.
Joe feared that he was a burden or a pest. Of course not, ER insisted: “Time with you is pure self-indulgence.”
On 20 April 1941 ER and Joe went to see Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine. The first lady’s entrance was greeted with “great applause and everyone stood,” Joe noted. They were both moved by Hellman’s “forceful play.” At one point the character Kurt, a German antifascist, decides to return to work in the anti-Hitler underground, and the Spanish Civil War’s International Brigade song plays. ER “gripped my hand,” Joe noted. Afterward they had a long conversation about courage and Joe wondered if it was “possible to have single minded devotion to a better world, like Kurt, outside of the CP.” ER thought less about “ideology or theory” as the source of action than character and the human heart. Would she herself “be able to stand up when the going really got tough?” she wondered. “Could one reconcile oneself to death and go forth to meet it indifferently?” While Joe insisted class interests were paramount, ER insisted that unselfish revolutionary courage across all class lines was needed.
The intensity of Joe and Trude’s difficulties occasionally distracted ER, while the bitter war escalated. The Luftwaffe bombed London relentlessly on 10 May 1941, the worst day of the Blitz, causing damage to most of London’s landmarks, including the British Museum, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, and the House of Commons. A total of 1,436 civilians were killed that one night, bringing the death toll of British civilians to 43,000.
In the spring of 1941, ER’s “service plan”—for universal conscription for public service—received a great deal of new publicity, most of it hostile. She now championed Massachusetts representative Edith Nourse Rogers’s bill to create a women’s army auxiliary corps.
Isolationists opposed ER’s call to service, as could have been expected, but ER was appalled by the vigorous protests that came from Joe and Vivian Cadden, two AYC leaders she differed with but had sought to remain personally close to. She had believed them when they denied having any Communist affiliations. But now, patently in thrall to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, they likened her call to service to “Fascist or Nazi” slave labor and said it would lead “straight to the system of German Work Camps.” Joe Cadden even accused ER of being a “social fascist.”
It was unforgivable. ER refused to let their twisted words and abusive allegations distress her. Instead she courteously and eloquently refuted them. But the friendship was over, and the episode engendered a level of mistrust that would mark all of ER’s future dealings with Communists.
On 3 May 1941 Winston Churchill cabled the president, calling on him “immediately to range [the United States] with us as a belligerent power.” The president responded by declaring a new state of “unlimited national emergency.” On 27 May he addressed the nation, promising to provide for all “naval and military” needs and “give every possible assistance to Britain and to all who, with Britain, are resisting Hitlerism.” He did not name the controversial convoys but insisted, “The delivery of needed supplies to Britain is imperative. This can be done; it must be done; it will be done.” Although public opinion favored FDR’s announcement, he subsequently told reporters the United States was not about to enter the war or change its Neutrality Law.
June brought, in addition to the worsening international situation, a wave of personal difficulties. ER’s brother Hall’s alcoholism was endangering his life, and when his physician counseled immediate hospitalization, he refused. SDR’s health too was a concern: all spring she seemed listless and fatigued. ER thought she had had a stroke and offered to take her to Campobello in July.
FDR underwent a protracted bout of silence and inaccessibility both in the White House and at Hyde Park, caused not only by the international situation but also perhaps by his mother’s worrisome condition. He was rarely in his office and preferred to be alone in his bedroom. On 4 June, walking with Joe, ER compared the president’s odd mood to SDR’s delicate Dresden china, which had to be handled with very great care. When Franklin Jr. joined them the next day, he was more blunt, referring to his father’s “I am Jesus—handle me with care” moods. “None of us saw him,” Joe observed. “But he needed the isolation.” Although the reasons for FDR’s period of withdrawal remain unclear, Missy LeHand believed the president was exasperated by everyone about everything.
Then on 21 June, Missy herself had a massive stroke that paralyzed her right side and left her unable to speak. FDR’s closest companion for over twenty years, she had been his secretary, gatekeeper, dinner partner, party planner, and mainstay. ER regarded her as FDR’s junior wife, always treated her with affection and respect, and seemed entirely grateful for Missy’s devoted service to her husband and their shared interests. Esther Lape expressed surprise that ER remained so close to Missy, who, she believed, had replaced ER in basic ways on a daily basis. But after 1920 Missy’s presence had actually freed ER to live her own life. Now, after spending several weeks in the hospital, she was sent to Warm Springs to recover.
ER told Joe that she only rarely worried about Missy’s role as “gatekeeper.” While M
issy was courted by and attracted to various people who believed they were “indispensable” to FDR—including men she had dated, such as Tommy Corcoran and William Bullitt, and others like Felix Frankfurter—they would all “be surprised at their dispensability.” FDR “uses what suits his purpose, makes up his own mind and discards people when they no longer fulfill a purpose of his.” They all played up to Missy, but ER told Joe she generally trusted Missy’s judgment.
Grace Tully took over many of Missy’s tasks immediately, but she did not live in the White House. ER was concerned about FDR’s comfort, given all the vital roles Missy had played in his life, yet she remained in Campobello with Joe and Trude, preparing for the ISS summer institute for student leaders, which Joe would conduct. She hoped the five-week session there would focus on a global and democratic future, turning the war into a crusade not for fascism or Communism but for “human freedom and happiness.”
On 28 June she departed with Tommy and Trude after spending their final afternoon with Joe “assigning students to rooms and groups.”
The summer institute was marked by serious discussions, earnest efforts, brilliant exchanges, marvelous entertainment, and jolly times. Some of the students who participated had been recommended by their colleges, while others had participated in earlier ISS conferences. Among the notable speakers were Shakespearean scholar and former Smith College president William Allan Neilson and his best-selling author wife, Elisabeth Muser Neilson, whose recently published book The House I Knew described her girlhood in Germany. The Neilsons set a delightful pace, despite the adolescent pranks and late-night noise in very close quarters.
Archibald MacLeish read poetry, discussed literature, and hosted several evenings during which his wife, concert vocalist Ada Hitchcock, sang German Lieder and French ballads with Elisabeth Neilson. ACLU cofounder Roger Baldwin, Louis Fischer and his son George, journalist James Wechsler, William Agar, and many others spoke about politics, international relations, and the need to organize for peace and justice. Walter White of the NAACP “did most to fire the group with the need to ‘do something.’” His descriptions of southern bigotry and “the discrimination and humiliation he encountered in the defense industries and in the armed services shocked and aroused the institute.” The students vowed “to change the situation [he] so vividly and horrifyingly described.” Petitions to Congress were only the beginning; the students intended to return to their campuses and clubs to make racial discrimination a focus of their efforts.
The ISS event was stellar. ER enjoyed the students and was impressed by the work and sincerity of the notables who volunteered their time to galvanize the youth movement.
SDR was also at Campobello, spending her vacation mostly in bed. She was attended by a companion/helper, Kathleen Crawford, a nurse, her sister Aunt Kassie, and various friends who did not mind this “very quiet life” as much as SDR did. ER left Campobello after the ISS institute ended, relieved above all that “Mama was really well & cheerful.” FDR, delighted, wrote his mother on 2 August, “I’m so glad you really are feeling better, & that you like the nurse & that you do what she says! . . . We go on board the Potomac . . . and cruise away from all newspapermen & photographers & I hope to be gone ten days—There is I fear little chance of my getting to Campobello.”
FDR was actually en route to meet the USS Augusta on 9 August at Placentia Bay in Newfoundland—to anchor the Potomac alongside HMS Prince of Wales, for his first wartime meeting with Winston Churchill. It is unclear whether ER knew his true destination. “Early in August,” she recalled in her memoir, “my husband, after many mysterious consultations, told me that he was going to take a little trip up through the Cape Cod Canal . . . to do some fishing. Then he smiled and I knew he was not telling me all that he was going to do.”
She was ultimately fascinated by the details of this secret rendezvous. Not only FDR’s senior military staff but also his sons Franklin Jr. and Elliott, already on active duty in the area, were ordered to Newfoundland. Both were initially disturbed by the sudden order, and when Franklin Jr. was told to report to the “commander in chief,” he wondered what he had done wrong—then was ushered into his father’s arms.
Churchill and Roosevelt’s candid meeting resulted in a new friendship. They issued a joint declaration, known as the Atlantic Charter, listing eight “common principles” and democratic war aims “for a better future.” A statement of hope, the charter promised nothing, but it aroused a movement for global justice that grew over time. Decades later Nelson Mandela, like many in Africa and Asia, credited the Atlantic Charter for its inspiration to fight tyranny and oppression, since it “reaffirmed faith in the dignity of each human being and propagated a host of democratic principles.”
In the short run, however, the Atlantic meeting disappointed Churchill, who had expected a stronger alliance. He wanted FDR to join him in a declaration of opposition to Japan’s continued aggression in the Pacific: it must stop or face war. But the president refused. Such an ultimatum, he argued, would only exacerbate the Japanese war party’s nationalism. Moreover, isolationists still dominated Congress, and despite FDR’s urgent appeals for continued military training during this moment of real emergency, the House had voted to extend the Selective Service Act by only one vote.
While FDR was away, ER visited her children in Cambridge and gave a lecture at Harvard; hosted the Hampton Institute quartet and spiritual chorus at Hyde Park; dedicated a new NYA center; spent some time in Washington; visited Alexander Woollcott, the critic and journalist; read government documents and Shirer’s Berlin Diary; wrote columns; and returned to Campobello for the institute’s closing on 30 August, visiting Trude en route.
Trude told her that her time in Maine with her therapist had clarified her thoughts and she had decided to return to Eliot Pratt. She had not “honestly faced my situation before,” she wrote to Joe. She had been “afraid and weak and now these last months seem terribly wrong—like a life snatched from somebody else.” She had “to go back.”
I can promise that I shall be honest—and I pray for courage and insight. . . . You believed that I was free to love you—when I said I was—and now you are involved in something that belongs to my past and you suffer. A thousand times these days I have prayed for some way to help you—but I can only try to be a better person. Your love is true and right—and strong. And because you love so much you have made it possible for me to believe again that I might become able to serve a belief I had long since given up.
Joe promised to do his best to respect her decision, and helped ER to close the Campobello house. Joe had agreed to spend his two-week holiday with ER at Hyde Park, and the two of them drove there with Tommy.
Upon their arrival, ER was shocked to see SDR looking dreadfully haggard and gaunt. During the next few days, SDR got weaker and more listless. On 5 September ER called FDR in Washington and urged him to get home the next morning. He did and spent the day with his mother in amiable conversation. That very Saturday ER learned that her brother’s liver had stopped working. During the night Sara slipped into coma. ER and FDR were at her bedside all night and the next morning, and they were with her when she died on 7 September 1941. ER devoted her column in tribute to SDR:
An anxious 24 hours culminated a little before noon today in the death of my husband’s mother. Had she lived until the 21st of September she would have celebrated her 87th birthday. One can have none of the resentment which comes when death cuts short a young life, but she was a very vital person with a keen interest in living, and I think had she had a few more years . . . she would have lived them with keen avidity and enjoyment.
She was born in the year 1854, brought up in a large family and endowed with the Delano beauty. She sailed to China on a clipper ship, as well as to Europe on the most modern of today’s steamers. Her early experiences were picturesque and interesting.
I think her family . . . would say that her strongest trai
t was loyalty to the family. She had no hesitancy about telling her near and dear ones their faults or criticizing their behavior, but if anyone else in the world were to attack a member of her family she would rise in their defense like a tigress. . . .
She would give away large sums of money and save small ones. The President’s mother always attributed her little economies, like undoing string and folding wrapping paper for future use, to her New England upbringing. She was not just sweetness and light, for there was a streak of jealousy and possessiveness in her where her own were concerned. But when others were bored she would be kind, and had the gift of making all those around her feel that the word “grand dame” was truly applicable to her.
She spoiled her grandchildren perhaps a little, but they had great affection and respect for her. I think even some of her great grandchildren will remember her when they grow up as a very beautiful, stately old lady who loved them and made them feel that Hyde Park would be theirs as long as it was hers.
ER’s words were heartfelt. She admired her mother-in-law and was impressed by her ever-expanding political vision and public activism. In the end, they shared a commitment to freedom and justice, respect across racial and religious divides. Yet she soon wrote to Joe:
I looked at my mother-in-law’s face after she was dead & understood so many things I had never seen before. It is dreadful to have lived so close to someone for 36 years and to feel no deep affection or sense of loss. It’s hard on Franklin however and the material details are appalling & there of course I can be of some use.
ER left SDR’s funeral in Hyde Park to return to Washington. She accompanied her dying brother Hall to Walter Reed Hospital, where she spent most of her days and nights for the next two weeks. She sat at Hall’s bedside with Zena Raset, his devoted companion. Daily, Tommy came by with her mail, and they worked on her broadcasts and columns. She also made calls, did chores, and wrote letters, especially to Joe. “With Hall I have an odd mixture of feelings,” she told him. “The next few months are going to be a strain so I’m going to cling to all the hours I can steal to be with you and people that I love! Just don’t let me be too demanding!”
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3 Page 49