Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Madame Chiang left Washington for a national tour to raise money for United China Relief. She appeared at a Madison Square Garden rally chaired by Wendell Willkie and later at the Hollywood Bowl, with film stars and thirty thousand of their fans. Afterward hotel staff in Chicago and Los Angeles told Tommy outlandish stories of Madame Chiang’s “extravagance and arrogance” during her visits, at which point ER finally understood the antipathy she aroused. Henry Morgenthau noted, “The President . . . is just crazy to get her out of the country” before her rude manners get discovered and “spoil her public image—and with it his policy.”

  Before Madame Chiang left the United States in June, she encouraged ER to consider making a lengthy visit to China. In a late-night conversation, FDR acknowledged to his wife that he recognized Madame Chiang’s “brilliance.” “F. said one most interesting thing,” she told Lash, “namely that he looked for less trouble between us & Russia & China than between any of us & Great Britain.” ER believed FDR’s true anticolonial sentiments underlay those words.

  In December 1942, FDR had dispatched diplomat William Phillips, his trusted friend, to New Delhi as his personal emissary to India. ER objected, assuming that Phillips would merely support Churchill’s commitment to the empire and urged FDR to send Winant instead. The leaders of the Quit India movement were still in prison during Phillips’s tour (which lasted from 11 January to 25 April 1943). From his jail cell, Mahatma Gandhi held a protracted fast from 10 February to 2 March—which generated worldwide sympathy. George Bernard Shaw told the Tagore Society, “The imprisonment of Mohandas K. Gandhi is the stupidest blunder. . . . It and the unpardonable flogging business associated with it has wiped out our moral case against Hitler. The King should release Gandhi unconditionally as an act of grace . . . and apologize for the mental defectiveness of his cabinet. That would do what is possible to save the Indian situation.”

  Phillips was not allowed to visit either Gandhi or Congress Party leader Jawaharlal Nehru in prison. Arguing that his services as FDR’s special envoy would be incomplete without a conversation with Congress Party leaders, he appealed to the British viceroy Lord Linlithgow, who responded by suggesting he go “on a tiger hunt.” Churchill himself “had put Gandhi off-limits” to Phillips.

  But Phillips wrote full reports for FDR, in which he favored India’s immediate independence. There were twenty thousand Congress activists in prison, he reported, and “growing dislike of the British and disillusion with us.” On 3 March, he reported that India was part of “the new idea which was sweeping over the world: freedom for oppressed peoples. This movement had been given great impetus by the Atlantic Charter.” FDR was surprised. “Please read this from Bill Phillips,” he wrote to Hopkins. “It is amazingly radical for a man like Bill, but he has been there fairly long now and has his feet on the ground.” Decency demanded action.

  ER concurred, relieved to have been wrong about Phillips. “To throw [the Congress activists] in jail where they can do nothing is absurd,” she wrote Joe. Phillips thinks “the British viceroy is stupid & obstinate,” and he had recommended to Churchill that negotiations among all the leaders should be initiated and a program to lead to India’s freedom be “inaugurated at once.”

  When Phillips returned to Washington in May, FDR was “very complimentary” about his work. That week Phillips went to the State Department and met with Breckinridge Long, who was also surprised by his perspective, noting in his diary that Phillips “says the British are obdurate about Gandhi and about self-government. . . . Bill is highly critical of the English. He was always an Anglophile. . . . To hear him now was . . . unexpected and strange.”

  Phillips then went to the British embassy, where he met with Churchill himself. The visit was unsettling: “the great man thumped the table and screamed at him a la Hitler,” Phillips told his wife afterward. To the Roosevelts, he described his meeting with the prime minister as useless—Churchill was not interested. In the end Churchill’s view prevailed, despite all the protests against Britain’s brutality. FDR decided to step back and instead of returning Phillips to India sent him to London with the OSS. The future of India would have to await the war’s end.*

  Eager to be part of her husband’s grand design for a secure and peaceful future, ER made plans to visit Russia and China. But to her dismay, FDR decided they were premature, since he planned to meet Chiang and Stalin first. He wanted ER to go to New Zealand, Australia, and the Pacific islands for at least a month. Although crestfallen, she did not protest.

  • • •

  During the spring and summer of 1943, the significant differences between the president and the first lady intensified. ER invited a delegation of eminent German refugees to the White House for dinner with FDR and Henry Wallace. Among the guests were Trude Pratt’s friend Paul Hagen; Paul Tillich, of the Union Theological Seminary; Adolf Loewe and Hans Staudinger of the New School; and Friedrich Pollock of Columbia University. The economists “Loewe and Pollock are Jews,” Wallace noted; Tillich “is a good friend of both Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr,” and all were connected with Germany’s “Christian Socialism” movement. At the dinner table ER requested they outline possible directions for postwar Europe. Their learned conversation did not engage FDR, who had no interest in their independent socialist views.

  During this time FDR became increasingly distant from ER, and his good friend and cousin Daisy Suckley called him “the loneliest man in the world.” Suckley, who visited the White House frequently to keep FDR company, disapproved of ER’s friends, particularly Pratt and Lash.

  Suckley was not alone in her disapproval. The Secret Service considered Joe Lash, a Spanish Civil War veteran, and Trude Pratt, a scholar, philanthropist, and anti-Nazi activist, “questionable.” As her friendship with Joe and Trude deepened, ER herself became suspect.

  The FBI had earlier investigated her closest assistants Tommy Thompson and Edith Helm. When she learned of it, she had directly confronted Hoover and protested his “Gestapo tactics.” Now she was outraged to learn she personally was a subject of “investigation.”

  In March ER and Tommy spent two days in Chicago with Joe, who was now serving in the U.S. Army Air Force and was posted nearby at Chanute Air Field. Upon leaving the Blackstone Hotel, they were told that “G-2 operatives had shadowed her” and “bugged their rooms.” According to Tommy, “what the hotel people thought was an FBI agent asked all kinds of questions about ER’s guests, particularly Joe Lash who spent Friday and Saturday night with us. . . . It turned out that the agent was Army Intelligence and they have been shadowing Joe Lash constantly. ER was furious.”

  Joe’s Spanish Civil War service was the issue, they understood, and everyone who “went over to Spain with the Abraham Lincoln brigade” was “suspect and being watched.” Joe told ER about the searches he had endured in his room at the base. He understood that he would always be a subject “of special scrutiny.”

  The Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) probe, which was either independent of or in cooperation with Hoover’s FBI, collected letters and information from bugs in the wall and clippings of newspaper articles by such “Reds” as Harold Laski. On 17 March 1943 the CIC concluded there was a “gigantic conspiracy participated in by Subject [Lash] and Trude Pratt but also by ER, Wallace, Morgenthau, etc.” The conspiracy was supposedly initiated by their disapproval of FDR’s ongoing “Vichy gamble,” a conclusion reached in part from something Trude had written to Joe: “I spent a rather terrible hour reading [the documents about Allied policy in North Africa]. They apparently all came from the Vice President and ER seemed troubled because more and more often [Henry Wallace] gives her those things and never shows them to the President. She wonders why he does not feel he can.” Some of the investigators’ personal observations were equally twisted. For example, Joe had written to ER in gratitude for their Blackstone night together: “I’m sorry that I was such a drowsy soul after dinner, but it was nicer drowsi
ng in the darkness with you stroking my forehead than playing gin rummy.” From such words the CIC determined that ER and Lash were “intimate.”*

  ER was distraught both for them and for herself. She spoke with Harry Hopkins and General George Marshall to “insist that Army intelligence respect her privacy.” Hopkins and Marshall assured her the surveillance would be stopped, but she suspected that it would not. Tommy thought, from subsequent conversations with ER, that either Hopkins “isn’t playing straight with ER or else his information isn’t very reliable.”

  The historical record has confirmed some things. We do know that FDR gave Hoover a free hand to wiretap at will—although it was entirely illegal. We know that FDR enjoyed Hoover’s intimate gossip and loved reading his secret documents. We know that FDR told Henry Wallace, several times, and with a certain amusement, that the FBI’s file on his wife “would make her appear to be the worst enemy of the United States.”

  But many questions about the surveillance involving ER remain: Did FDR know that his wife’s letters were read and her conversations monitored? Did he order the coverage? Did he read their correspondence? Did they ever discuss the situation? And we will never know if ER—after she learned of the bugs and mail cover—continued, even intensified, her correspondence with Joe and Trude, more fully to communicate with her husband. We can only ponder the effect upon him when he read the letters that caused Hoover’s agents to conclude the existence of a vast conspiracy involving Morgenthau and Wallace.

  • • •

  The Nazi defeat at Stalingrad on 2 February 1943 gave rise to a wave of protest against Hitler within Germany. Posters and leaflets saying “Freedom!” “Down with Hitler!” and “Restore Democracy!” appeared at the University of Munich and in many German and Austrian cities. The White Rose, a student group organized at the University of Munich in May 1942, issued leaflets that were a call to arms and were meant to fire up student protesters by informing them of the atrocities committed in their name:

  There is great ferment in the German nation. . . . Are we to sacrifice the rest of German youth to the basest power . . . ? Never again! The day of reckoning has come, the day when German youth must settle accounts with the most despicable tyranny our people have ever endured. . . . Freedom and honor! Bravely on, students! The beacons are aflame!

  Members of the White Rose were anti-authoritarian. Their student organizers were Sophia Scholl, a biology and philosophy student; her brother Hans Scholl, a medical student and Stalingrad veteran; and their friend Christoph Probst, a medical student. Accused of sabotage and treason, they were beheaded on 22 February 1943. Of the initial White Rose students and faculty arrested, six were guillotined at Plotzensee in May, and sixteen more in August. From April to August many other students and faculty members who had created, financed, and distributed anti-Hitler leaflets were also tried for high treason.

  News of the White Rose spread widely and inspired hope. Thomas Mann told the BBC world network on 27 June that the German Volk and the Nazis were no longer indistinguishable. “The world is deeply moved” by the anti-Nazi student demonstrations, he said, by those who “put their young heads on the block . . . for the honor of Germany. . . . Good, splendid young people! You shall not have died in vain; you shall not be forgotten.”

  In the United States, the American Friends of German Freedom expanded their activities, and ER and Trude became more involved. The group planned a political warfare campaign to include coordinated contact with emigrants and refugees, radio and leaflet propaganda, and direct aid to the many underground groups that continued to struggle despite bloody reprisals.

  At the same time, in the spring and summer of 1943, newly elected members of Congress made their presence felt. A new cohort of southern Democrats and conservative Republicans engorged the ranks of those who supported the Dies Committee and boosted the already virulent right-wing movement. They attacked ER as she worked to rescue European Jews and other endangered victims from Hitler and fascist appeasers, extend Social Security to domestic workers and farm laborers, end discrimination in war plants and segregation in the military, and create a movement to secure a just and lasting peace. She was forever baffled by Dies and his supporters who pursued “Communists” rather than fascists, ignoring the horrendous slaughters.

  At this time a new campaign arose to challenge Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, end the protracted silence and the ongoing inaction, and actually save people. Playwright and Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht and a group of international and Palestinian Jewish activists led by Peter Bergson (aka Hillel Kook) conceived of the stirring pageant We Will Never Die. Hecht wrote the script and Kurt Weill composed the music; Moss Hart directed it, and Billy Rose produced the star-filled show, which featured Stella Adler, Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson, Frank Sinatra, Sid Caesar, George Jessel, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, and Hazel Scott. First performed at Madison Square Garden, it was broadcast live and performed for audiences throughout the country. On 12 April ER attended the sold-out Washington performance in the company of six Supreme Court justices, cabinet members, various military officers, diplomatic representatives, and more than three hundred senators and members of Congress. ER applauded “the mass memorial in Constitution Hall dedicated to the two million Jewish dead of Europe. . . . Flags of all the nations occupied by Germany came on the stage. No one who heard each group come forward and give the story of what happened . . . at the hands of a ruthless German military, will ever forget those haunting words: ‘Remember us.’”

  On 13 April, at Trude’s request, ER spoke at a dinner for the American Friends of German Freedom in Washington. She insisted that her column readers “do all we possibly can to recognize” antifascist groups in Germany and its captive lands “and to strengthen them.” Since most of the Friends of German Freedom were democratic socialists, associated with New Beginning (Neu Beginnen), ER addressed them specifically: “There must be a partnership between those who work with their hands and those who work with their heads. They must all insist on their common interest because they are the workers of the world . . . who must control their governments in order to have a chance to build a better life throughout the world.”

  In August ER addressed a White Rose memorial at Hunter College. It was attended by Kurt R. Grossmann, who subsequently wrote Sophie Scholl’s sister Inge about the “moving, exciting, unforgettable evening.” “Hundreds and hundreds of New Yorkers” paid tribute to the martyred heroes who proved that “Hitler was not the master of all Germans.” According to Grossmann, “two of the speakers were extraordinary personalities.” ER’s speech “was moving and of great political significance,” and the “leading Negro” activist Anna Hedgeman “spoke in the name of all suppressed people.”

  On 11 May, ER celebrated the spirit of defiance and learning that informed the White Rose: “Today is the 10th anniversary of the very notorious day when Hitler . . . ordered the burning of all books by such authors as Pearl Buck, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Ernest Hemingway, Selma Lagerlof, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Mann, Stephen Vincent Benet and Sigrid Undset.” The best way to enslave a people, she wrote, was to deprive them of education “and thus make it impossible for them to understand what is going on in the world.”

  But Germany was “highly educated,” and Hitler had had to return to “medieval days and burn the books whose philosophies were opposed to his.” By controlling and suppressing all the “ways in which ideas are transmitted”—radio, newspapers, all “sources of information”—he continually sought to enslave his people. But now after ten years that situation seemed about to end. Daily, “the people whom Hitler has enslaved” were in contact “with the world of free expression and thought.” There was now hope that soon “Hitler will have to face the judgment of his own people”—who once liberated would be greatly changed and rededicated to freedom.

  ER’s spring 1943 efforts on behalf of rescue and refugees coincided with the twelve-day Anglo-
American Bermuda Conference, called presumably to reconsider havens for Europe’s remaining Jews and bolster the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. Britain insisted on the conference, in response to parliamentary distress and church appeals to provide sanctuary and rescue those immediately endangered. But neither the State Department nor the Foreign Office wanted to deal with a flood of refugees—not in Palestine, North Africa, or the United States. FDR had nothing to say about it and was content to leave it all up to Breckinridge Long, who considered it nothing more than a public relations distraction.

  If anything, Long claimed, helping Jews would increase anti-Jewish and anti-Roosevelt sentiment, which were already widespread throughout the United States. Consistently opposed to all rescue efforts, he was adamantly opposed to a recent British proposal to use “North African territory for an internment camp for German, Czech and stateless Jews now in Spain. To put them in Moslem countries raises political questions [of] paramount military importance—considering that of the population of 18 million behind our long lines 14 million are Mohamedans.” Long feared a conflagration if “Jewish people [were located] in Moslem territory.” Rumblings of danger had already appeared in Palestine, Syria, North Africa, Iraq, and Iran. “Altogether it is a bad tendency.” Alternatively, Long suggested Ethiopia or Madagascar.

  Long did not mention oil, but earlier he had confided to his journal shock and outrage at Britain’s arrangements for future pipelines. It had secretly made plans to exploit its lend-lease acquisition of “hundreds of miles of pipe to pipe oil—after the war—from yet untouched and undeveloped oil fields south of the Caspian Sea—to Basra.” On 29 January 1942 Long noted that Britain had entered a treaty with Russia and Iran for “title to the lines in the post war settlement. . . . And we who own the pipe, transport the pipe, and furnish the pipe—were not to be considered.” He quickly set up an arrangement with Iran so that the United States would not become a subject of “derision.” Fearful and prescient, Long undoubtedly influenced FDR’s changing attitude toward Britain: “England’s policy seems to emerge. Suck the United States dry. When the peace comes ally with Russia. Let Russia have Poland, Eastern Germany, Baltic States, Finland. Hold the Mediterranean; Turkey . . . the Dardanelles. Hold Iraq and Iran and India.” By following this policy, Britain would render the United States politically isolated and commercially strangled.