Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  She arranged unusual alliances, ran creative conferences, and achieved surprising victories. When Congress threatened to end the school lunch and food stamp programs, she was determined to fight for them through the OCD, with her staff and her friends. A conference on the wartime needs of children produced an interagency agreement for federally supported day care, with additional grants to states for “maternal, child health, and child welfare services.” Kellogg considered ER “inspiring,” and Leila Pinchot, who volunteered in the OCD’s Washington office, was dazzled by the way “her passionate integrity” affected community leaders.

  But Fiorello La Guardia disagreed with her conception of the OCD’s mission. He held that it should be limited to providing civilians with physical protection against air raids, through military defense, air raid wardens, and police and fire departments. On her first day back from the West Coast, ER called a staff conference to deal with the division.

  On 19 December the realities of war and sorrow engulfed her own heart and hearth when she and FDR “had a strictly family party” for Jimmy and Rommie. It was Jimmy’s birthday, and he was about to leave for active duty with Major Evans Carlson’s new Marine Raiders Battalion. Only days before, ER had learned from a newspaper account that her son Elliott had returned to active duty, assigned to a bomber squadron. All four of her sons were now in uniform, and so “there will be three boys whose whereabouts for us are wrapped in mystery.”

  That night she took the night train to New York, and she phoned Joe the next morning. “Her voice did not have the customary ring to it,” he recalled, “so I asked her how she was. There was a period of silence. I thought perhaps she had not heard. We both mumbled something inconsequential and hung up. I sensed something was seriously the matter and though I had a staff meeting [left] without hat or coat, jumped into a taxi and went up to 65th Street.” ER started “to scold me for having come” but then confessed she was upset “and burst into tears.” He thought it was about OCD tensions, “which shows how little I understand her.” Jimmy had been ordered to Hawaii, and Elliott was now with a bomber squadron. Franklin Jr. and John were in the navy. “She knew they had to do it, but it was hard. By the laws of chance not all four would return.”

  • • •

  On 22 December ER returned to Washington to prepare for Christmas, and learned a secret guest was about to arrive: Winston Churchill. The household went into mayhem mode to ready the rooms for him and his staff and to provide sufficient gifts around the Christmas tree. The Monroe Room, where ER held her press conferences, would become the Map Room, creating an office for the British delegation.

  ER originally arranged for Churchill to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom, “the favorite of most male guests,” recalled J. B. West, the chief usher. But upon his arrival on 22 December, the prime minister rejected the bed, so he wandered the second floor, “tried out all the beds and finally selected the rose suite,” where SDR and the queen had resided.

  Churchill’s pink-faced cherubic style and literary flair amused ER, as did his cigars and costumes, which ranged from a one-piece “jumpsuit” to casual nudity. His “most colorful . . . living habits” would remain the subject of staff gossip for years. But she was unsettled and even disturbed by his rude presumptions, gruff behavior, and loud manner. Churchill, she was overheard to say, was unable to have real conversations. He made loud and abrupt speeches, during which he pronounced his verdict. He cared nothing about her opinion or anyone else’s. Indeed, her most enduring worry about him was his disregard for public opinion and the people’s right to know.

  Churchill’s incessant drinking also disturbed ER, who was still mourning for her brother and always in grief for her father. His frightful daily alcohol intake reminded her of their excesses. It began with a jigger of scotch when he awoke, and he appeared to continue with scotch all through the morning. He slept in the afternoon and drank champagne and wine at dinner. Then during late-night meetings he puffed on cigars, while FDR smoked cigarettes, and they drowned their differences and difficulties in buckets of brandy. His unrelenting schedule was exhausting to FDR, ER believed, and she grew concerned about her husband’s health. When she approached him about Churchill’s influence, however, he dismissed her nonchalantly: alcoholism was limited to ER’s side of the family.

  FDR had invited Bernard Baruch to the White House for the holiday as well, which pleased Churchill. Baruch believed that the prime minister’s visit would galvanize U.S. public opinion. With the Pacific fleet in ruins, Wake Island fallen, Singapore besieged, and the Philippines invaded, Baruch considered Churchill “the best Christmas present” to restore heart and hope to the Allied world. “The pink-cheeked warrior in the air-raid suit” was the leading symbol of resistance to the Blitz: “Do your worst, we can stand it,” his presence seemed to say. “We won’t crack up.”

  On 26 December Churchill addressed the joint houses of Congress, invoking a vision of Allied cooperation to uphold the British Empire forever. That particularly disturbed ER, who found him to be a reactionary and an uncompromising imperialist. “I don’t trust any of us with too much power,” she wrote Anna, “& I want the other nations in too!” She had “talked much with the P.M.,” she wrote Hick, “& he is a forceful personality but the stress on what the English speaking peoples can do in the future worries me.” He was “loveable and emotional and very human,” she told Anna, “but I don’t want him to write the peace or carry it out.”

  Every day while Churchill was in residence, the White House was filled with dignitaries who concentrated on priorities and strategies for victory. Would this be an Asia-first war, or was the European theater still of primary concern? What about additional aid for besieged Russia? What of North Africa? They also discussed the postwar world. Since Churchill’s arrival on 22 December, he and FDR had been working on a Joint Declaration of Unity and Purpose. They had each written an initial draft and then negotiated their differences.

  ER wanted the discussions to take up what victory would mean for the suffering people of the world. On every issue she intruded the human factor: What was the right thing to do? What would be the human cost? How much would we regret this injustice? On occasion her husband listened to her views, but most of the discussions occurred after dinner, after the men had left the room to resume their negotiations. Increasingly, she was on her own—and she and a growing group of allies who insisted on real democratic change took their views to the public. She never knew which of her words her husband might accept and use.

  On the morning of 29 December, FDR wheeled into Churchill’s room to announce, “The United Nations—it would be a Declaration of the United Nations” rather than an alliance of “Associated Powers,” as initially drafted. For a New Year’s lunch, ER invited Joe Lash and seated him next to Churchill. “I did not open my mouth,” Lash noted. “The language poured out of him . . . witty, poetic.” There were political exchanges. Churchill “jested” FDR about his Vichy gamble: “You are being nice to Vichy. We are being nice to de Gaulle.” When FDR replied it was best to leave the matter to Hull and Halifax, Churchill “muttered, ‘Hell, Hull and Halifax.’”

  At dinner that night, the discussion centered on the United Nations. Everybody present supported FDR’s designation of a United Nations both as an ally for victory and as an institution to secure the Four Freedoms and human rights as detailed in the Atlantic Charter.

  After dinner, Ambassador Maxim Litvinov and China’s new ambassador, T. V. Soong (Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s brother), arrived to sign the document. FDR had persuaded Litvinov that freedom of religion included all religions, as well as atheism or freedom from religion, and Stalin agreed to sign.

  The Big Four, who would “police” the peace—the United States, Britain, the USSR, and China—were listed at the top of the declaration. Churchill had agreed after some argument, reluctantly, to include India among the other twenty-two signatories, listed in alphabetical order—rather
than have the British Commonwealth as a unit atop, in dominance. In the wide-ranging discussion, Churchill said he hoped that a group of “other authorities,” meaning Charles de Gaulle’s Free French, might sign. FDR opposed that.

  Then the difficulties of a genuine Soviet alliance were discussed. Harry Hopkins, recently returned from meetings with Stalin, urged greater support for Russia’s war effort, more supplies, and Allied action to open a second front. Churchill recalled that in the war against the Bolsheviks in 1918–19, when he had served as Lloyd George’s war secretary, he had “gotten as far as Tula, just south of Moscow. . . . Now he forgave the Russians in proportion to the number of Huns they killed.”

  Hopkins asked, “Do they forgive you?”

  Churchill replied, “In proportion to the number of tanks I send.”

  FDR thought the Soviets did not forgive and did not trust—and that the future depended on policies that would change that. As the conversation wandered, Hopkins announced that Litvinov “was upstairs pacing . . . like a caged lion.”

  Shortly after ten, ER and her company were summoned to the Oval Office to witness the signing. She asked if the declaration might be read aloud. FDR “started to demur,” but Churchill “said yes.” Before he read it, he quoted from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

  “Here, where the sword united nations drew,

  Our countrymen were warring on that day!”

  And this is much, and all which will not pass away.

  FDR signed first, then Churchill, Litvinov, and Soong. Then Churchill pranced about the room, exclaiming, “Four fifths of the human race” had just sealed Hitler’s doom. Playwright Robert Sherwood called it a “prelude to a new world symphony.”

  • • •

  Bitter anti–New Dealers increasingly accused ER of socialism and deplored her efforts to ensure racial peace. A group of corporatist promoters who supported the war effort sought to limit, even destroy, all progressive change. They wanted to end youth programs, curtail Social Security, and terminate labor agreements. ER and her efforts at OCD became one of their primary targets.

  Newspaper columns and radio programs attacked her with vitriol. Never before had she felt so alone. Previously her work had been to promote and popularize her husband’s policies, or the ones with which she agreed. Now his policies were cloaked in mystery and secrecy, and she was uncertain about his priorities. After Churchill’s arrival, his sensibilities seemed to change. Suddenly he seemed to disregard certain of the courtesies and formalities she had come to depend on. He did not ask for her thoughts and advice, and did not include her in discussions where her input would have once been regarded as valuable.

  To counter Churchill’s influence on her husband, she was determined to fortify democracy. Vigilant and anxious, she would go about the country to build community movements for wartime unity. She would use every waking hour—on the radio, in her columns, at OCD headquarters—to advance her vision.

  During the Blitz, she learned, “group activities, especially dancing and rhythmic exercises” had improved children’s morale. Her friend Mayris “Tiny” Chaney agreed to head a new OCD effort in which children’s exercise, especially physical education and dancing, would become part of the program for defense and preparedness. Tiny moved to Philadelphia and became director of children’s activities under John B. Kelly, an Olympic gold medalist in rowing and affluent Democrat, better known as the father of film star Grace Kelly, who ran the OCD’s physical fitness department.

  ER was so convinced that exercise and dance contributed to health that she encouraged her OCD staff to enjoy “physical exercise, dancing, and singing” during lunch hour. For weeks, they were seen dancing in the corridors or doing calisthenics on the roof.

  She met with twenty-five representatives of the Save the Children Fund to discuss children’s issues “largely in the mountain areas,” especially the need for hot lunch programs; clothing and shoe distribution; and salvaging and woodworking projects. The fund provided desks for many schools that had never before had them. She continually argued for proper nutrition for children: “In one mountain county, I am told that 70 percent of the boys were rejected in the draft because of malnutrition. . . . Our interpretation of education must never be so narrow that we lose sight of the fact that learning to read on an empty stomach, or with eyes that are overstrained because of lack of proper eye-glasses, is not real education.”

  ER wanted race relations placed at the center of the nation’s agenda. In January, the Fight for Freedom’s stage, screen, and radio divisions presented a “Salute to Negro Troops.” She commended this “most moving and thrilling . . . pageant on the contribution of the Negro people.” Dedicated to “democracy and liberty,” it reminded us, she wrote, of our national promise, “which we have never completely carried out.”

  Her friend Melvyn Douglas proposed the idea of a creative arts and performance agency for wartime “information and propaganda.” The OCD’s new director, Harvard Law School dean James Landis, approved and asked Douglas to head the Arts Council. Douglas was appointed on 4 February. ER looked forward to a close collaboration with him and with Helen Gahagan Douglas, and was startled when an avalanche of protest greeted the appointment. The most vicious and persistent attacks came from Congressman Leland Ford (R-CA), who chided Douglas for hiding his birth name, Hesselberg.

  The Hearst press went berserk, and a startling range of Roosevelt haters joined the assault: ER was paying her “pink” pals—misfits, parasites, and fan dancers who “did the hoochee-koochee”—a huge sum of money that was needed for real defense.* The fact that ER’s staff were mostly volunteers who worked only for their expenses was ignored in the deluge of meanness that flooded the airwaves and cascaded through the halls of Congress. Tiny Chaney was mortified, and Douglas was irate. “To know me is a terrible thing,” ER lamented. The storm went on for weeks. As Congress debated appropriations for the OCD, ER offered to come in and testify on the work involved. Her offer was rejected.

  • • •

  ER spent much of January and February speaking to troops and to young people, to women’s clubs and civic centers. In Texas and Tennessee, she had conversations with several pilots who had just “ferried planes to some place” and had flown for “a great many hours.” Hailing from “all over the country,” these young men had only a little free time to “sleep or see a show, or have a real meal at someone’s home.” On another flight she spoke to “Army boys” and sailors, including one who “must have added a few years to his age, for he looked fourteen.” She felt it “curious” that so many Americans accepted the youthfulness of the military forces. “Every day that goes on, means more young men in every land are dying. I am confident that our cause is just, but I want to see youth free again to fight a different kind of war, a war to find a way by which we all live more decently and happily together.” She never lost sight of the big picture and hoped that “in every factory today, and in every service camp,” people would discuss “the kind of a world they intend to build” at war’s end.

  That new world, ER believed, must achieve political and economic “freedom for every individual regardless of race, creed or color,” and her essential task at the OCD was to ensure that it did. She carried the message to North Carolina, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, as well as to Arthurdale, West Virginia, the community she cared so much about and that had made much progress. ER encountered opposition to her racial views during her travels but wrote nothing about it. In Atlanta, she was told that no people of color were welcome in their civilian defense programs. But she met women of color who wanted to volunteer and “were anxious to do their part.”

  Working alongside ER were her ISS allies, as well as university and southern liberals—notably George Shuster, president of Hunter College; Frank Graham, president of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Harriet Elliott, a dean at North Carolina State Normal and Industrial Colleg
e (now UNC Greensboro); and activists from the Southern Conference. But opposition forces grew stronger.

  In mid-February, abuses were heaped upon her efforts at OCD. Certain members of Congress challenged Mayris Chaney’s dance program, insisting that dance was “not quite moral,” but ER defended it, and declared dance an art that belonged in OCD since many people “will not take other forms of exercise.” When Director James Landis questioned whether John Kelly’s physical fitness program really belonged in the OCD, she replied that it might go to a permanent agency, since nobody questioned the need “for young and old, rich and poor, in this country to be physically fit.”

  Finally, amid the unrelenting criticism, FDR encouraged his wife to resign. ER persuaded Tiny to step down at the same time, and they both submitted letters of resignation on 18 February 1942. Congress passed the OCD appropriations bill, which included an amendment prohibiting funds for physical fitness instruction, fan dancing, “frills and furbelows.” Encouraged by ER to remain, Melvyn Douglas organized the Arts Division but would resign the following December to join the army.

  ER’s last day at OCD was 20 February 1942. Her entire staff resigned with her. Subsequently she wrote, “I do not think I was ever happier than when the weight of that office was removed from my shoulders.” Her five-month ordeal serving as the target at which FDR’s opponents vented their wrath “was one of the experiences I least regretted leaving behind me.” In her column, she concluded her OCD journey with wartime advice from Calvin Coolidge about survival on slim means: “Eat it up. Wear it out. Make it do. Do without.”