Eleanor

by Joseph P. Lash

  With Stevenson appearing to have removed himself from consideration, she became unsure as to whom to support. James was campaigning for Kefauver, Franklin Jr. for Harriman. And between the two she seemed to lean toward Harriman. He was the speaker at the Hyde Park Memorial Day services for FDR in the rose garden. Did that mean she was supporting him for the presidency, Cyril Clemens inquired:

  I have not come out for any candidate, either Republican or Democratic. I have known Averell Harriman since he was a little boy. He came to Hyde Park to speak at the Memorial Day ceremonies for my husband but it was not a political speech.

  It was not a political speech, but she was keenly aware of the value to any candidate of identification with the Roosevelt heritage.5

  She had little time for politics in the spring of 1952 as the Human Rights Commission was in session, still trying to reach agreement on the two covenants, one covering civil and political rights and the other economic, social, and cultural rights. She doggedly kept at it, even though Republican support for the Bricker amendment, which would make it impossible for the United States to adhere to the covenants, made it unlikely that the Senate would ever approve the covenants. What was to turn out to be her last day with the Human Rights Commission proved to be the longest, and she remained to the bitter end. The Commission’s parent body had directed the eighteen-member group to terminate in mid-June the session that had begun early in April. All that remained to be done on the final Friday was to adopt a routine report on the Commission’s progress. At eight thirty, Friday evening, the Commission settled down for what they thought would at most be a three-hour session. But they had not reckoned with the Russians, who felt they had to get in the last word—even, as one delegate remarked, if no one were listening. Earlier in the day Mrs. Roosevelt had circulated among the delegates a mimeographed document answering some of the accusations against the United States during the Commission’s debates. In order to expedite the Commission’s business, Mrs. Roosevelt chose this method of reply rather than a speech. But the Soviet group, instead of being grateful for one speech less, called this procedure unfair and unprecedented, and at four in the morning, using the pretext of explaining his vote on the Commission’s report, the Soviet delegate launched a lengthy attack upon the United States and Mrs. Roosevelt. It was close to 6:00 a.m. when she left the UN headquarters building and gratefully sank back into the cushions of a passing taxi. “What are you doing up at this hour?” the incredulous taxi driver asked her.

  Having been away from Hyde Park so much, she decided not to attend the Democratic convention in Chicago in July and turned down India Edwards’s invitation to speak to it about the United Nations. Then Truman urged her to come. She was reluctant because “a political convention audience would not want to listen.” But Truman pressed her. “If you really meant that you want me to make a speech at the Democratic Convention, will you please have someone let me know what day and what hour as soon as possible?” He certainly did mean it. He wanted someone to tell the country just what the United Nations meant to peace in the world, and she was the best person to do so. “I will do my best to make a speech to which the delegates will listen,” she wrote Frank E. McKinney, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and then added a few crisp thoughts on the conduct of conventions in the new day of television:

  I watched the Republican Convention and I think TV has completely revolutionized what should go on at a convention. I was bored to death by the parades and floor demonstrations. If we can possibly prevent any such goings on at our convention it would gain in dignity and in interest and in educational value to the TV audience.

  Also I think the length of speeches could with profit be materially cut down. Nearly everyone in the room with me went to sleep before General MacArthur and ex-President Hoover had finished and yet I have heard people say General MacArthur’s speech had real oratorical appeal, but it did not keep people awake.6

  The day before she flew out to Chicago she told reporters she hoped the Democrats “will adopt a really courageous civil rights plank,” but refused to indicate her preference among the candidates for the presidential nomination. When the reporters persisted, she laughingly called attention to the division among her sons and maintained that as a mother she could not take sides. Not only was James for Kefauver and Franklin Jr. Harriman’s campaign manager, but Elliott and John had come out for General Eisenhower.7

  “MRS. F.D.R. STOPS THE SHOW,” the New York Post headline described her reception by the convention. The crowd rose to its feet as it spotted her coming down the runaway to the speaker’s platform. A roar welled up. The band began to play “Happy Days Are Here Again.” The state standard bearers, except for a few southern holdouts, massed in front of the platform. Mrs. Roosevelt sought to begin but the tumult continued until the temporary chairman banged his gavel and said, “Will the delegates please take their seats. Several million people are waiting to hear the First Lady of the World.”8

  She spoke first of her husband. “This demonstration was not for me,” she said. “It was for the memory of my husband.” Then she launched into her speech about the United Nations, criticizing the “small articulate minority” that advocated U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations, an attitude she characterized as “a selfish, destructive approach which leads not to peace but to chaos and might eventually lead to World War III.” She compared the cost of the United Nations—seventy-seven cents per person each year—with the cost in dollars of World War II—“$1,708 for every person alive”—and concluded her speech with another reference to her husband (was it an unspoken rebuke to Truman for having failed to mention Franklin in his speech to the United Nation?). She read to the delegates from the speech on international cooperation that FDR had planned to deliver at the Jefferson Day dinner on April 13, 1945, “If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all people of all kinds, to live together and work together in the same world, at peace.”

  Lily Polk, whose friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt dated back to the early days of their marriages and who knew the Lucy Mercer story, wrote her in admiration: “What a wonderful thing it is to be able to pay a tribute to one’s husband as you did to-night and how very fortunate he was to have a wife who could so wonderfully carry on his work.” The Roosevelt mystique was still alive and potent, a State Department official watching the convention concluded. He sent her a paragraph from a letter of a colleague, a lifelong Republican.

  For a long time now it has been unfashionable even to mention Roosevelt. . . .Her appearance on the platform set off the most spontaneous and gigantic demonstration of either convention. There could be no doubt that it was something each individual delegate wanted to do and was doing only because he wanted to do it. The whole sense I got out of it was that in a strange kind of way Roosevelt and everything he stood for, represented the conscience of America and she stood there as the symbol of that conscience. It was a deeply moving hour. . . .

  Herbert Beaser, one of her advisers in the Human Rights Commission, felt that her speech “contained just those things which I think must be said and said repeatedly about the UN and our stake in its work.” And Agnes E. Meyer, of whom she had become quite fond in the course of their battle together for federal aid to the public schools, struck a militantly feminist note:

  You really saved the day for political women because the Republican women were if anything even more vulgar in their speeches and in their appearance than the Democratic women. It certainly must have been a relief for the women of the country to realize that one could be a woman and a lady and yet be thoroughly political.

  I realized once more how important it is the way women dress when they appear before the public. You were the only one who was suitably garbed.9

  She did not stay for the balloting, but when Stevenson was nominated she wired him congratulations, eliciting a graceful response from the candidate, about her “splendid speech” and the strength th
at her expression of good will gave him. Thus encouraged, she was soon sending him a “few” suggestions:

  The papers state that you are coming to New York City late in August. Will you forgive me if I make a suggestion to you? I have a feeling that Mr. Baruch would be very much flattered if you ask, as soon as possible, whether you could see him while you are in New York. . . .

  Unfortunately President Truman is so annoyed because Mr. Baruch would not give up his old rule of not coming out openly for a candidate and heading a financial committee for him that they exchanged unfortunate letters and President Truman felt that his information could be of no use to him.

  You may feel exactly the same way but I have always found that while it took a little tact and some flattery to get on with the old gentleman I got enough information with valuable experience back of it to make it worth while. He is not always a liberal and you will not always agree with him but fundamentally he is sound and I think it is valuable to have some contacts with him, particularly unofficial ones.

  He had written Baruch, Stevenson promptly replied. He knew Baruch was a mine of sound advice. “You have never added a ‘headache’ and you never will. I hope you will give me any suggestions [you have] as the campaign progresses.”10

  She was for Stevenson, but she was also looking him over. A note of vexation crept into a reference to him in mid-August:

  Eisenhower does not seem to me to be saying much. I’m anxious to see Stevenson develop his theories. He told Averell he was critical of FDR in his handling of Congress & his inability to get along. It isn’t really possible under our system I fear, for the Executive and Legislative to get along well.11

  Stevenson called on Baruch at the end of August. The elder statesman was not taken with him, or perhaps he had already decided he was going to support Eisenhower, an old friend. In any case when Eisenhower, hard on the heels of Stevenson, came to see him, he showed how his mind was running when he eagerly posed for a picture with the general, something he had not done with the governor. “I do not like the gang around Stevenson one bit,” he informed Mrs. Roosevelt.12

  While Stevenson’s first campaign speeches displeased Baruch, they exhilarated her. Indeed, a shiver of delight was felt throughout the liberal community as his new voice spoke out with a clarity and wit that were as rare in politics as was the courage that compelled him to criticize patrioteering before the American Legion convention and the filibuster when speaking in the South.

  I grow more enthusiastic about the governor day by day. Even General Eisenhower and Senator Nixon and Senator McCarthy, all of whom have wept over the amount of humor that Governor Stevenson has been able to put into his speeches and who have remarked that such things as the Korean War, taxes and inflation had nothing humorous about them—even these gentlemen’s tears haven’t dampened my ardor.13

  Unlike 1948, she was ready to campaign this time and disappointed she was not asked. Whose fault it was is not clear. She blamed the Democratic National Committee. “I could not have taken an active part in the campaign,” she wrote India Edwards,

  but I have not been asked to do anything and now when I am going back in the General Assembly the most I could do would be two or three radio or TV programs in New York City but if what I have been asked to do is a sample of what others have been asked not much can be going on.

  The Volunteers for Stevenson were short of money, she added, and the New York organization, although inactive itself, was keeping the Volunteers from operating upstate.14

  She thought the regular organization, from Washington down, was sulking. Stevenson had fired McKinney and had installed his own man as national chairman and had shifted campaign headquarters from Washington to Springfield. The Truman people felt that he had done this in order to dissociate himself from the Truman administration. Their resentment was accentuated by Stevenson’s failure to ask the president “until too late” to get into the campaign. “The President can do a great deal for Stevenson,” Mrs. Roosevelt’s letter to India Edwards ended, “but it is Stevenson who is running and certainly most of the work must be done by him.”15

  The growth of her confidence in Stevenson was matched by her disenchantment with Eisenhower. Despite her “many ties” to the Democratic party, Mrs. Roosevelt told a campaign rally in Harlem, she was “willing to listen” when the general was nominated.

  I felt that a victory had been won because we were going to have two good people. As the campaign has progressed I have never been sadder in my whole life. I had great respect for Eisenhower. I knew him as a general. I did not know him as a candidate. As a candidate I have never felt so sorry for anyone before.

  I know that it must have been terrible to face yourself—to realize that you have been persuaded that you must go out and stand beside men who had said things about someone who had been your best friend, someone who had really given you the opportunity to rise to great position.

  Yet he [Eisenhower] stood by the side of [Sen. William E.] Jenner, who said that General Marshall’s life was a living lie.

  How General Eisenhower could do that I cannot understand. I cannot understand how he could give a mark of approval to Senator McCarthy. I consider that Senator McCarthy in fighting communism has injured the people of the country because he fought it in the wrong way. . . .16

  Of Governor Stevenson, Mrs. Roosevelt said that “he knows more about the world than almost any other man in this country,” and that as governor of Illinois, in working with the legislature, he had received good training for working with Congress. The August annoyance with Stevenson for having spoken disparagingly of FDR was wiped out. She arranged for Stevenson to come to Hyde Park to lay a wreath at Franklin’s grave and to breakfast with her. “I have heard no one in the campaign who could make the people understand the complicated situations before us so well and in such simple and beautiful prose, as Governor Stevenson,” she wrote in her column.17

  The western alliance was building up its armed strength, but for Mrs. Roosevelt this was strength needed in order to bring about a settlement with Soviet Russia. Her report to Truman after the 1951 General Assembly had returned to the subject, Ambassador Murphy’s admonition notwithstanding, of the need to make some dramatic bid for a settlement with Moscow:

  We need something dramatic to prove to our allies that we are not planning war when we have attained equal strength with the Russians or what we feel is equal power, but we must show that we are going to use NATO to bring about peace.

  I think it can easily be proved that nothing can be done with the Russians except when we have power but with SHAPE doing a military organization job something dramatic must emphasize what our ultimate objectives are.

  Stevenson understood the interrelationship between power and peace, she thought, and would know how to handle the Russians. “Mr. Stalin, I think, will find a better match in Governor Stevenson than in General Eisenhower,” she wrote privately.18

  But Election Day produced a Republican landslide. Eisenhower received the largest vote ever given a presidential candidate up to that time in American history. There was, nevertheless, some comfort for Stevensonians like Mrs. Roosevelt. More than 27 million Americans voted for Stevenson, which was the largest vote ever given any Democratic candidate.

  “The campaign was well worth while,” she wrote Mrs. Ives, Stevenson’s sister, “in that it started a process of education which I hope will continue for the next four years.” She saw Stevenson leading the Democratic party in opposition; and to the tender, solicitous note that she wrote him after his defeat, he replied that he had no regrets except the disappointment of his friends, and she was at the front of the list of those to whom he was grateful.19

  She would help Stevenson, but she also had to face the problem of her own role under a Republican administration. In 1948, after Truman’s surprise victory, she had told reporters that she planned to devote the rest of her active life to the United Nations as “the best hope we have for peace.” By the end of 1952 as the
Republicans prepared to take command, she had come to symbolize humanity’s search for common ground more than any other UN personality, except the secretary-general. While FDR was alive there had been an internal monitor that kept her from statements and actions she thought might embarrass him. In her service to the United Nations since his death, it was as if the brakes had been taken off. As a public personality she was freer, more self-assured, a powerful voice for world peace and respect for human dignity.20

  She seemed a natural choice for President-elect Eisenhower to continue at the United Nations, especially in the light of the principle of bipartisanship that had governed U.S. representation at the United Nations since its inception. She wanted to stay on, but she also wanted Eisenhower to feel free to designate whomever he wished. Her appointment as a delegate to the General Assembly automatically ceased with its adjournment in December. Her appointment as the U.S. representative on the Human Rights Commission was for a five-year term, but, she informed the State Department the day after the election,

  even though I was appointed for a full term on the Human Rights Commission I would prefer to resign so that the incoming President and Secretary of State may feel free to appoint a Republican woman.21

  There were press reports that she would refuse a UN appointment from President-elect Eisenhower. They upset Baruch. “May I ask that you do not resign or take any step before we have a talk,” he asked her. “You have learned much and are the recipient of as much experience as anyone in dealing with the Russians.” Her reply indicated not only the reasons why Eisenhower might not wish to reappoint her but the terms under which she would be willing to serve in a Republican administration: