Eleanor

by Joseph P. Lash

  Truman’s victory surprised and pleased her but it did not change her assessment of his leadership:

  It is rather nice to be an American when the people so evidently take their democracy seriously & do their own thinking as they did in this election. I did not have enough faith in them! Dewey wasn’t just big enough & I think they felt more sincerity if not ability in Truman.

  I do feel, however, that those among us who want the Democratic party to stay a progressive party will have to try to remind the members of Congress that they were elected on that basis & owe labor groups & liberals some real consideration. The President is so easily fooled in spite of his good intentions. I am going through a very difficult time with the delegation on its true & future position in Palestine & am much upset by some of the things that go on. The interchange of letters between the Secretary & myself would be funny if it were not so tragic, for he as well as the President is fooled. I hope & pray Mr. Lovett goes for I think he is a dangerous person in the State Department.34

  The election had been won in an astonishing and personal triumph for Truman, a tribute to his grit and spirit, but the struggle to transform the Democratic party into “a new party” still had to be waged. The liberal task was unending. “I hope we can keep the President & his advisers really moving on liberal lines,” she wrote two weeks after the election.35

  And when she saw the president on her return from Paris, in the memo that she left with him she set forth what she felt should be the country’s major foreign-policy concern in Mr. Truman’s second term:

  I have a feeling that our situation in Europe will be solved in the next year without too much difficulty. Our real battlefield today is Asia and our real battle is the one between democracy and communism. . .we have to prove to the world and particularly to downtrodden areas of the world which are the natural prey to the principles of communist economy that democracy really brings about happier and better conditions for the people as a whole.

  The Communist threat was not military, but political and economic. We were “really fighting ideas as well as economic conditions,” another section of the memorandum noted.36

  And from Illinois there had come a thank-you note from a man who would later articulate the challenge posed to the United States by what he would describe as “the revolution of rising expectations.” “It’s all your fault,” Governor-elect Adlai E. Stevenson wrote her in Paris in reply to her cable of congratulation. “You told me last fall to go ahead and have a try at it, and I have profited enormously from the experience quite aside from the amazing victory.”37

  * “The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was the Eightieth Congress,” Truman later said.7

  7. CARDINAL AND FORMER FIRST LADY

  THERE WERE SOME IN THE POSTWAR YEARS WHO CONSIDERED anti-Roosevelt calumny a form of patriotism and Mrs. Roosevelt’s elimination from public life a public service.

  Westbrook Pegler made a career of attacks upon her. The New York World-Telegram had dropped his column, but it had been picked up by the Hearst papers. His abuse knew no bounds. “The widow,” “La Boca Grande,” “the Gab,” “Eleanor the Great” were some of his names for her. He described her as the daughter of “a dissolute drunkard,” a coddler of Communists, accused her of living off the taxpayers’ largesse, and on occasion even suggested she was a liar. Her opposition in the United Nations to the return of ambassadors to Franco Spain outraged him, as did her treatment of Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty as a political figure and not simply as a religious martyr. That was nothing but the Communist line, he maintained, “Yes, I want to know more about the whole lot of them [meaning the Roosevelts] and I want to run up the whole vile record of treachery which I know there is to be had and chisel it on rock as a memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt.”1

  She would later explain to reporter Carl Rowan: “I always thought (and his wife, in fact, once told me) that he could never write unless he was angry and that he actually looked at my husband’s picture to make him angry.” That was a vicious lie, Mrs. Pegler wrote her. She considered her husband saintly, idealistic, and a patriot. “I am very sorry if I quoted you wrongly,” Mrs. Roosevelt replied, “but I remember very distinctly a picnic at Mr. Bye’s when you spoke to a group of us and said that Mr. Pegler wrote better when he was angry. . . .I know what a devoted husband and father Mr. Pegler has been and I have always been careful to say so.”

  She rarely answered Pegler publicly. Privately she thought him a “character assassin,” and to answer him publicly “would please him and urge him on to further attacks.” Why did her “big, strong sons. . .not ‘horsewhip’ him?” an outraged Ladies’ Home Journal reader suggested. “Why should they bother,” she replied, “to horsewhip a poor little creature like Westbrook Pegler? They would probably go to jail for attacking someone who was physically older and perhaps unable to defend himself. After all, he is such a little gnat on the horizon. He cannot touch my husband’s memory.”2

  She was right. The public wearied of Pegler. He was dropped by the Hearst papers when William Randolph Hearst, Jr., took over their management and insisted that he stop his attacks on Mrs. Roosevelt. He transferred his fulminations to the publications of the Birch Society. As he disappeared into obscurity he was heard to express wonder at Mrs. Roosevelt’s invulnerability.

  Like her uncle Theodore, Mrs. Roosevelt enjoyed a good scrap. To stand up for the underdog, she knew from three decades of public activity, meant to run the chance of public attack and vilification. She rather enjoyed the fray and was resigned to the attack. “After all these years,” she commented in reference to the mudslinging that was inevitable in politics, “I’ve learned not to let that sort of thing get me down.”3

  Yet even she was taken aback by the violence of the denunciation suddenly launched against her by Francis Joseph Cardinal Spellman in July, 1949. The issue that precipitated the controversy was federal aid to parochial schools, which Mrs. Roosevelt adamantly opposed; but the leaders of the Catholic church responsible for its political interests had long been unhappy about Mrs. Roosevelt. Her friendliness toward Loyalist Spain in the thirties, her support, even though discreet, of birth control, her sponsorship of the American Youth Congress and other organizations in which the Communists had been heavily represented had vexed the clergy to the point of public expression of its displeasure even while she was First Lady.

  She, on her side, had become increasingly concerned over the growth in temporal power of an institution that she felt was aggressively conservative in social and political matters, and since she now wrote and spoke as she pleased, she did not hesitate to take positions in opposition to the church. When New York City’s public schools, without a public hearing, in response to Catholic pressure, banned the Nation from their libraries because it had published Paul Blanshard’s articles on Catholic power in America, she protested the ban. The hierarchy was furious. Just how furious it was was conveyed to Herbert Lehman, who was told that because he had signed Mrs. Roosevelt’s letter asking for a public hearing on the ban, he was considered anti-Catholic; in addition, a number of monsignors warned that if he ran for the Senate in 1949 for the seat vacated by Robert Wagner, he would not get the Catholic vote. “It seems too stupid to be true,” she wrote Lehman, “but the Cardinal has been doing stupid things of late.” She wanted him to know that she would be grateful if he consented to run and he could count on her whole-hearted support. “In thinking over this threat of Catholic opposition, I can not take it very seriously because they have had the experience of your Governorship and no one has ever been fairer to all races and creeds.”4

  But, she felt, it was neither the issue of federal aid to parochial schools nor the controversy over the Nation that was exasperating the cardinal and his associates. The “real count” against her was “that they have heard I was responsible for not returning Ambassadors to Spain in the last meeting of the General Assembly.” There had been a move to revoke the UN resolution that called on all member states to break
relations with Franco Spain. The United States might have supported it except that Mrs. Roosevelt within the delegation firmly opposed any concessions to Franco until the generalissimo agreed to reform and liberalization at home. She was supported by Ben Cohen and John Foster Dulles. Their protest was effective.5

  All this was in the background when Mrs. Roosevelt wrote a column courteously taking issue with the cardinal on the school-aid controversy. The nation provided public schools, she wrote, because they strengthened democracy. Others had a right to set up private schools, but they were not entitled to, and should not receive, public funds. The separation of church and state was a basic constitutional principle, and those like herself who defended it could not be accused of religious prejudice since she firmly believed in the right of any human being to belong to whatever church he saw fit and to worship God in his own way.6

  Cardinal Spellman’s answering broadside took the form of an open letter. He charged her with misinterpreting his and the church’s position on federal aid. His plan, he said, called for government provision of “auxiliary services”—nonreligious textbooks, bus transportation, and health services. He considered her column a “personal attack” upon him, accused her of conducting “an anti-Catholic campaign,” and, taxing her with failure to come to the defense of imprisoned Cardinal Mindszenty, ended on an excommunicative note which stunned the country:

  Now my case is closed. This letter will be released to the public tomorrow after it has been delivered to you by special delivery today. And even though you may use your columns to attack me and accuse me of starting a controversy, I shall not again publicly acknowledge you. For, whatever you may say in the future, your record of anti-Catholicism stands for all to see—a record which you yourself wrote in the pages of history which cannot be recalled—documents of discrimination unworthy of an American mother!7

  The letter caused a world sensation. She would answer the cardinal in detail in a personal letter, Mrs. Roosevelt commented calmly in her column. She was sure the cardinal had written “in what to him seems a Christian and kindly manner and I wish to do the same.” She denied “ill-feeling toward any religion,” reaffirmed her belief in freedom of religious worship, and emphasized her concern not to feed the fires of bitterness and division among Catholics, Protestants, and Jews.

  Her letter to the cardinal spelled out her views on federal aid. It rejected charges of anti-Catholic bias, noting that she had supported many Catholic candidates for public office. It corrected the cardinal on the subject of the defense of Cardinal Mindszenty, reminding him that she had protested his imprisonment.

  I cannot, however, say that in European countries the control by the Roman Catholic Church of great areas of land has always led to happiness for the people of those countries.

  She touched delicately on her fear of the church’s efforts to shape public policy to its own advantage through political manipulation.

  Spiritual leadership should remain spiritual leadership and the temporal power should not become too important in any Church.

  She closed the letter with a sentence that an unhappy Catholic layman, who was a friend of both Mrs. Roosevelt and the cardinal, called “devastating”:

  I assure you that I had no sense of being “an unworthy American mother.” The final judgment, my dear Cardinal Spellman, of the worthiness of all human beings is in the hands of God.8

  If Mrs. Roosevelt was calm, feelings elsewhere ran high. Four thousand letters poured into Hyde Park, more than nine out of ten of them favorable and many from Catholics enclosing letters they had sent to the cardinal. Bernard Bishop Sheil, the auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago, came to her defense. But his was a maverick voice in the hierarchy. “I suppose you know that you were attacked by Catholic priests in pulpits here last Sunday,” May Craig advised her from Washington, “so it is Church policy.” The Spanish Falangist journal Arriba wrote that: “In Eleanor Roosevelt you have one of those cases which in Spain we would call mannish women or ‘macherras.’”* “Is Mrs. Roosevelt a sort of Stalin in petticoats?” a Madrid radio commentator asked. “Where does her power lie? Why does Mr. Acheson obey her with so much submission?”9

  She would not be surprised, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote a friend in mid-August, “that the Cardinal had had word from the Vatican and that the letter was partly written there.” A United Press dispatch, datelined “Vatican City, July 29,” quoted a semiofficial Vatican source in support of the cardinal:

  There is no doubt here that if Cardinal Spellman deemed his intervention necessary as an expression of the Church, it was necessary and therefore approved.

  The intervention of the Cardinal is undoubtedly not directed against the person but rather against the acts of the person.

  If those acts deserved a reprimand, then the reprimand is sage.

  “The whole episode with Cardinal Spellman, as far as I am concerned, is only part of a much larger situation,” Mrs. Roosevelt observed. “I think they felt the time had come to form a Catholic party in this country and hoped it could be accomplished. It was a disappointment to them that it did not turn out quite the way they hoped.”10

  Whatever the motives behind the cardinal’s attack on her—and one can only speculate, for the church’s archives on this matter are still closed—the public outcry against the cardinal’s letter showed that he had overreached himself. “It has stirred up a lot of anti-Catholic feeling that was lying just under the surface and had, I hoped, melted into tolerance,” wrote May Craig. Another newspaperwoman, Doris Fleeson, raised as a Catholic, noted that the Jesuit publication America “did not dare to take up the cudgels for the Cardinal.” “Not in a long time,” said the Raleigh News and Observer, Josephus Daniels’s newspaper in North Carolina, “has America been presented with a spectacle of a man behaving with less tolerance, less Christian humility, and more readiness to damn and malign those who disagree with him than that shown by Cardinal Spellman of New York.” Although he was a Catholic, Bill Hassett, one of Truman’s secretaries and formerly one of Roosevelt’s, called the cardinal’s letter “an appeal to prejudice.” He was “outraged,” wrote William Phillips, who as Roosevelt’s ambassador to Italy in the mid-thirties was familiar with the workings of the Vatican. The cardinal’s accusations were “absurd, but they are dangerous too, and I am a bit fearful of what our weak-kneed politicians may do in connection with the forthcoming legislation on Federal aid.” The cardinal was “vindictive” and “a strike-breaker as well,” wrote trade-union leader Rose Schneiderman, still a firebrand. “I shall always remember how he made the poor gravediggers crawl back on their knees and give up their union in order to get their jobs back.”11

  “Have you forgotten, Prince of Rome,” wrote Archibald MacLeish in a poem that he entitled, quoting the cardinal, “I SHALL NOT AGAIN PUBLICLY ACKNOWLEDGE YOU”:

  Have you forgotten, Prince of Rome,

  Delighted with your Roman title,

  Have you forgotten that at home

  We have no princes?. . .

  Prince of the church, when you pretend

  By rank to silence criticism

  It is your country you offend,

  Here man’s the faith and rank’s the schism.

  A devil’s brew of discord and division was boiling up, one result of which might be to defeat the Democrats that fall. One of the most courageous condemnations of the cardinal’s letter came from Lehman. He was, at the time, vacationing in the Adirondacks. It took courage because he still planned to run that fall against Dulles for the Senate seat vacated by Wagner. “I’m going to speak out,” he told his wife, “but we may as well kiss the Senatorship good-by.”

  The issue, said Lehman, “is not whether one agrees or disagrees with Mrs. Roosevelt on this or any other public question. The issue is whether Americans are entitled freely to express their views on public questions without being vilified or accused of religious bias.” Coming on top of his protest against the banning of the Nation, there was every prospec
t that the church would use its influence to defeat him if he ran. Mayor O’Dwyer, himself a candidate for re-election in New York, was aghast upon returning to the city. The controversy “will divide our people into two camps,” he warned. Privately he told Mrs. Roosevelt that “it must have been the weather,” that had led the cardinal to pen such a letter. Publicly he pooh-poohed charges that her stand on federal aid might have been actuated by prejudice. He would do what he could, he announced, to bring about a reconciliation.12

  “Do not be misled or trapped by overtures re a reconciliation,” Bill Hassett begged her. “Personally, you’re better off without it. The initiative must come from the Cardinal himself. He should approach you hat in hand, make public apology and beg forgiveness. . . .He knows already that Catholic opinion is divided in a controversy for which he is solely responsible.” But she was not averse to a reconciliation. She thought it was very bad to have the country split “on an emotional religious issue.”13

  She told President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson that if her renomination to the United Nations would be divisive, they should not feel “the slightest embarrassment” in not naming her a member of the delegation to the 1949 General Assembly:

  I realize that the attitude of Cardinal Spellman which has developed towards Governor Lehman and towards me, makes appointing me an embarrassing and difficult situation, and I would regret adding to your difficulties. I want you to feel entirely free to do what you deem best for the work of the United Nations and our government situation.14

  He wanted her back at the General Assembly, Truman replied immediately. She was needed at the United Nations more than ever. She was right and the cardinal wrong in the controversy over federal aid to education. He wasn’t backing down, the president remarked to Hassett.15

  It was Ed Flynn in the end who wearily moved into the situation to repair the damage and bring about a truce. Tracking her down at a radio station, he asked her to have lunch with him. “I am sick of politics,” he told her. He was having enough trouble with O’Dwyer over the mayoralty, but much worse was the religious division that was setting in because of the cardinal’s letter. He had worked against that sort of thing all his life. He had talked with the cardinal, he went on. He had a rough draft of a clarifying statement the cardinal would like to issue but which His Eminence would first like to read to her to see if she approved.†