In this climate, the Bermuda Conference, held in secret beginning on 20 April, was doomed to failure. It accomplished nothing for rescue refugees. No changes were to be made in immigration laws or procedures. Although “scarce shipping” was given as a reason, transportation was never the real issue: cruise ships floated back and forth mostly empty; troop transports returned home mostly empty; and prisoners of war were transported on such luxury liners as the Queen Mary.
Indeed, on 11 May, Churchill himself arrived on the Queen Mary with his daughter Mary and a considerable staff. Belowdecks were more than ten thousand German POWs who had surrendered in defeats ranging from Algiers to Tunis. Somehow there was room for them. Ultimately over 400,000 German POWs would arrive in the United States and be settled thinly and in comfort. ER was among the first to ask why there was room aboard these ships for POWs but not refugees. There was no response.
In a bitter irony, the Bermuda Conference coincided with the uprising in—and destruction of—the Warsaw Ghetto. For four weeks, from 19 April to 16 May 1943, Jews armed with rifles and handmade explosives rose up against fully equipped Nazi troops. After protracted street fighting, three hundred Nazis and seven thousand Jews were dead. Another seven thousand were deported to Treblinka, and ten thousand found refuge in Christian areas. Two days into the resistance, a Polish radio transmission “flashed news of the ghetto battle . . . ending with the words ‘Save us.’” According to historian David Wyman, the appeal was “radioed around the world” and reached New York and London. But no aid was dropped from the sky. On 16 May SS general Jürgen Stroop reported, “The Warsaw Ghetto is no longer in existence.”
• • •
ER continued to insist on an end to white supremacy during this war against race slaughter, and several real changes resulted from her determined stand. Responsible in part for the training of the Tuskegee Airmen, she was stunned to learn that while the first group of black pilots had passed all their tests, they remained restricted to the Tuskegee base in Alabama for over a year. In March 1943 the situation at Tuskegee was appalling. Local white police officers harassed black MPs on Tuskegee property, and a black army nurse, Nora Greene, was beaten “in a bus incident.” Tuskegee’s director, Frederick Patterson, wrote ER: “Morale is disturbed by the fact that the 99th Pursuit Squadron . . . is still at Tuskegee and virtually idle.” She forwarded his letter to Secretary of War Stimson: “This seems to me a really crucial situation.”
Her lobbying resulted in real change. On 5 April 1943 “the 99th was off to North Africa.” The 99th was the first unit of the 332nd Fighter Group of black combat pilots, called by some, with derision, “Eleanor’s niggers.” Known as “Redtails” for their planes’ insignia, the pilots called themselves “the Lonely Eagles.” The valiant Tuskegee airmen—all college graduates, defiant and fearless—would see action on many fronts from Tunisia to Berlin. Despite unrelieved segregation and routine insults from various officers, their steadfast heroism ensured amazing victories.
This degree of progress was not enough for Judge William Hastie, aide to Secretary of War Stimson. Within the rigid confines of segregation, he could not fulfill his assignment, to develop “fair and effective” policies for black troops. He resigned and in 1943 returned to Howard University to teach and initiate more public opposition to segregation, working primarily with Thurgood Marshall’s NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. ER was committed to all their efforts. Ultimately, Marshall called ER “Lady Big Heart”—and dismissed FDR as a tool of southern segregationists who “never did a damn thing” for the Negro.
ER did not judge her husband so harshly, but she regretted that he ignored her warnings about impending race violence. For over a year NAACP friends had reported that Detroit was a “hotbed of racial hatred.” In April 1943, some 26,000 white workers at Packard Motors stopped production on bombers and PT boat engines—to protest the employment of three black workers. The strike lasted almost a week, encouraged by the Ku Klux Klan. White workers were overheard to prefer victory for “Hitler and Hirohito [rather] than work beside a nigger on the assembly line.” On 21 June 1943 the city exploded as whites reacted, allegedly, to the integration of a lakefront beach at Belle Isle. Cars were burned; homes and stores were destroyed; thirty-four people were killed, twenty-five of them black; and seven hundred were seriously hurt. FDR ordered martial law and warned his wife to stay away. She agreed in principle, but then journeyed to Detroit to keynote the NAACP’s “huge Freedom Fund dinner.” Thurgood Marshall was forever impressed: “The president’s wife had the guts to speak [in Detroit] when racial hostilities were at their peak.”
That summer, as FDR prepared for his autumnal conferences with Chiang Kai-shek and Stalin and his preliminary meetings with Churchill, he increasingly fled from ER’s concerns and criticisms. They spent little time together. They agreed she might go on a protracted trip to the South Pacific in August. The more she disagreed with FDR, the more she turned to Joe and Trude for friendship and hope.
In mid-July ER joined Trude in residence for her divorce at the Tumbling DW Ranch in Nevada.* Suddenly ER enjoyed a week of rest and recreation. They hiked and rode horses, read and gardened. ER wrote, “Dearest Franklin, I’ve ridden twice and am I stiff!” They visited a fine Indian school that “gives sensible training to both boys and girls.” The area was “beautiful with a blue lake near us and mountains rising all around. But, the news is scarce and I wish I knew more about what is going on in the world . . . [and] I know none of your plans. Perhaps you’ll telephone me in San Francisco or at Anna’s?”
She returned home to news that Franklin Jr.’s destroyer had been torpedoed in Sicilian waters. She sent Joe a rambling letter recording her anxieties about losing a dear son, though Frankie “is o.k., but [despondent] about the men.” She awaited more information, to contact their families. She reiterated to Joe that he seemed “like one of my children,” but more than that, “a child with whom one has a deep understanding & friendship & for whom one has a deep respect.” She cherished her close relationships with Joe, Trude, and her daughter, Anna: “To have three young people one felt really deeply tied to, if they feel the same way, is really more than anyone should expect from life!”
She urged FDR to appoint women to the Bermuda Conference and to the UN conference 18 May–7 June 1943 in Hot Springs, Virginia, which would be attended by over thirty nations and created the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
But the growing refugee problem had reached critical proportions. A startling New York Times ad—written by Peter Bergson, Ben Hecht, and their allies—condemned the Bermuda Conference as “a mockery and cruel jest.” The Bergson Committee then organized an Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe, to be held on 20–25 July, at New York’s Hotel Commodore. Over fifteen hundred people attended, along with an amazing bipartisan range of luminaries: Henry Morgenthau, Harold Ickes, Wendell Willkie, Herbert Hoover, and William Randolph Hearst. Speakers Dorothy Parker and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia called for a new government agency to focus on rescue, food relief, sanctuaries, and havens in neutral and allied nations. Perhaps because she had been advised to refrain from attending, ER declined to participate but sent a message affirming her certainty that “the people of this country . . . will be more than glad to do all they can to alleviate the sufferings.”
The conference achieved extensive radio and press coverage. PM’s Max Lerner asked, “What About the Jews, FDR?”—“The State Department and Downing Street avert their eyes. . . . You Mr. President must take the lead. . . . The methods are clear. . . . The time is now.” ER joined the lobbying campaign and wrote the committee on 26 July, “I will be glad to say anything or help in any way.” Peter Bergson sent her a copy of his Findings and Recommendations of the Emergency Conference, which proposed a government rescue agency. ER gave it to FDR, who responded a few weeks later, “I do not think this needs any answer at this time.”
In Au
gust, the New York Times published a country-by-country “extermination list,” and ER met with Peter Bergson. “I do not know what we can do to save the Jews in Europe and to find them homes,” she wrote in her next column, “but I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.” That month Stella Reading sent an open letter to Churchill:
You know better than any words of mine . . . the horrible plight of the Jews at the mercy of the Nazis. I have said to myself what can I do, who can help. And the answer is clear, only Mr. Churchill can help and I can at least write and beg him to do so. In other days I would have come to you in sackcloth and ashes to plead for my people; it is in that spirit I write. Some can still be saved, if the iron fetters of the red-tape can be burst asunder. . . . England cannot surely sink to such hypocrisy that her members of Parliament stand to show sympathy to the Jewish dead and meanwhile her officials are condemning those same Jews to die? You cannot know of such things. I do not believe you would tolerate them. There are still some 40,000 certificates for Palestine even under the White Paper regulations. Mr. Churchill, will you not say they are to be used now, for any who can escape, man woman or child. Is it possible, is it really possible, to refuse sanctuary in the Holy Land?
I am your very ardent admirer and most obedient servant.
Stella Reading represented Britain’s WVS, was close to Clementine, and worked with Eleanor Rathbone, an MP who chaired the National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror. Yet to ER’s disbelief, Churchill ignored the letter. Like FDR’s State Department, Churchill’s Foreign Office avoided planning any rescue and continued to insist that all such questions must await the war’s end. This was not acceptable to Reading or Rathbone—who published a pamphlet, Rescue the Perishing, and sent it to the Foreign Office.
On 25 July news arrived that Mussolini had resigned in the face of mounting Italian opposition after the surrender of Sicily. “Like everybody else in the U.S.,” ER wrote, “we were excited by the news.” She had breakfast with two people who had interviewed Italian prisoners, in the United States and in Africa. They told her there was a vast democratic movement among POWs and throughout Italy. She believed this movement was to be nurtured, and “we can make real allies of the Italian people in the cause of future peace. . . . Perhaps we can help build something really dynamic . . . which will bring us closer together and keep us working for an ideal in the future, that will preclude the rise of dictators” and future wars.
Count Carlo Sforza, Italy’s former foreign minister, sought to create a liberation movement for a free Italian republic. Uniting behind him, Italians were writing their own future by overthrowing the thousand-year rule of the House of Savoy. “Death stares them in the face every minute,” ER wrote, “. . . and yet they go about their daily business unconcerned, knowing that the slightest slip might mean detection. . . . They will have the satisfaction of knowing when liberation comes that they are the ones who have kept alive the will to freedom among their people.”
Unlike ER, Churchill was alarmed by anti-Fascist demonstrations in Italy, which “was turning red overnight,” he cabled FDR from the Queen Mary, en route for a visit to Hyde Park with his daughter Mary:
“Nothing stood between the patriots rallying around the King and ‘rampant Bolshevism.’” Churchill called yet again for attacking Germany through the Balkans or Italy and postponing again the cross-Channel invasion. This time FDR’s advisers opposed Churchill’s “peripheralism” and “pin prick” strategy.
Completely absorbed by these political divides—so much in the news, and in everybody’s hearts—ER anticipated serious illuminating discussions during Churchill’s visit. As she prepared days of entertainment for the prime minister and his daughter, she looked forward to an exploration of the controversies Churchill had traveled so far to settle with her husband.
She was disappointed. Everybody made small talk. Nothing of substance was discussed in her presence. Mid-August at Hyde Park featured picnics, long swims, deck tennis, rides through the countryside, mint juleps at the Morgenthaus, and interesting guests, including cheerful children (ER’s nieces and their friends), Harry Hopkins, and Daisy Suckley. Mary Churchill sat beside FDR at several meals and found him “delightful and enthralling.” ER, Mary wrote, “was kindness itself and took personal trouble to see that I had a good time, notwithstanding her many preoccupations.”
But there “was no interesting conversation,” ER wrote Lape. Italy was not mentioned. Nobody referred to India, although that week a dreadful cyclone and floods had devastated Bengal, and two million Bengalis were starving. Calcutta officials had cabled FDR to appeal for immediate food aid, presumably stimulated by his eloquent speech that launched the FAO, wherein he had promised to end hunger at war’s end. There is no evidence that he replied to Calcutta’s plea.
Finally, there was no mention of refugees or rescue—not of her column, nor of Bergson’s report. But two days earlier FDR made a speech that acknowledged much she had argued for. The fourteenth of August was the anniversary of her father’s death, of the 1935 Social Security Act, and of the 1941 Atlantic Charter. This 14 August, seeming to return to their primary alliance, FDR called for an extension of Social Security and a national GI Bill of Rights. ER’s column that day supported her husband’s goal to eliminate “destitution” everywhere it lingered. If Social Security covered all those groups not covered, including agricultural workers, domestic workers, and the self-employed, and if health care were covered by Social Security taxes, Americans would have cradle-to-grave security.
Once again their paths came together, their goals shared. They went off on their separate journeys, once again a team. Tommy, ever observant, wrote Esther Lape that “the P was very sweet to her as she left.”
Chapter Nineteen
“The White Heron of the One Flight”: Travels in the Pacific and Beyond
On 17 August 1943, ER departed for a trip to the southwestern Pacific to confront the realities of war on her own. The dangerous twenty-five-thousand-mile journey would take her from Hawaii to New Zealand, Australia, and seventeen Pacific islands.* It was from these places that so many of the wounded and distressed whom she had met during her many tours of stateside hospitals had returned.
It would be her first international journey entirely alone, without Tommy to help write her column, keep notes, be the observant critic, do all the routine protective and political chores. “I hate to see her go,” Tommy confessed to Lape.
She said last night that she knew she would regret many times not having taken me, but thought it good discipline for her to do things for herself. . . . ER left yesterday on schedule . . . and I went to the airport with her. I was sad and I think she was . . . because she said good-bye rather hastily and walked to the plane and never looked back. . . . She left all her jewelry—engagement ring, pearls, etc. with instructions as to their disposal in case anything happened. . . . It gave me a queer feeling [since] she did not leave them home when she went to Great Britain.
Major George Durno, a former Washington reporter, was assigned to accompany ER throughout her six-week trip. He provided assurance, immediate comforts, advice, and a new friendship.
Between 17 August and 25 September, her columns carried datelines from the Pacific, explaining that she traveled as a “representative of the American Red Cross, paying her own expenses.” She visited Rotorua, the home of the Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, where she greeted her guide Rangi the traditional way—nose to nose. Rangi, she wrote, “was a wonderful woman—brilliant and witty and dignified. The area, with its geysers and hot-water pools, is like a miniature Yellowstone Park.” The Maori, who took to her, named her Kotoku, the “White Heron of the One Flight,” which according to Maori tradition “is seen but once in a lifetime.”
There and in Australia, ER spoke to vast audiences and, wearing a Red Cross uniform, visited hospitals, rest homes, and rec
reation centers. She comforted more than 400,000 servicemen and promised to contact their mothers and their loved ones. Everywhere she went, malaria was “as bad as bullets & caused more casualties!” She wrote Hick, “The people here [in Auckland] are kind & they like FDR & our marines have won all their hearts, so they are very nice to me. . . . These boys break your heart, but they’re so young & so tired. . . . They are hardly out of hospitals before they are at Red Cross Clubs & dances & they laugh at everything. I take my hat off to this young generation & I hope we won’t let them down.” Major Durno wrote Tommy that in New Zealand ER “did a magnificent job, saying the right thing at the right time and doing a hundred and one little things that endeared her to the people.”
To her great chagrin, she generally was chaperoned by officials and generals, who forbade her to visit danger zones. She protested and took to rising at dawn to breakfast with enlisted men and civilians. During her first night on Christmas Island, she endured her “first encounter with tropical bugs.” When she entered her room after dinner, the floor was “completely covered with little red bugs,” and “I nearly disgraced myself by screaming.” But then she remembered that she “was the only woman on the island” and stamped her feet until “all the little bugs scurried down through the cracks in the floor.” She had no personal confrontations with rats and snakes, the scourge of several nurses she interviewed.
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