“I am so sorry about the bill,” Eleanor sought to console White. “Of course, all of us are going on fighting and the only thing we can do is to hope we have better luck next time.”15
The president was angry with White and displeased with his wife. He did not say so directly, but a memorandum from Steve Early to Tommy no doubt reflected his views:
August 5, 1935.
Personal and Confidential
MEMORANDUM FOR MRS. SCHEIDER
Dear Malvina:
I have been asked to send you a memorandum containing information for Mrs. Roosevelt concerning Walter White, Secretary, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The memorandum is sent at this time because Walter White has been bombarding the President with telegrams and letters demanding passage of the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill before the adjournment of Congress: complaining about the War Department’s policy regarding the assignment of negro reserve officers in C.C.C. camps, etc.
Walter White for some time has been writing and telegraphing the President. Frankly, some of his messages to the President have been decidedly insulting. For example, in a letter he wrote the President on May 6th when he resigned as a member of the Advisory Council for the Government of the Virgin Islands, after expressing great disappointment that the Pres. did not make a public pronouncement by means of a message to the Congress which would openly endorse the Anti-Lynching Bill, he said:
“In justice to the cause I serve I cannot continue to remain even a small part of your official family.”
His file of correspondence is voluminous.
I am advised by those familiar with White’s actions at the Capitol that it was he who some time ago went into the restaurant within the Capitol Building and demanded that he be served, apparently deliberately creating a troublesome scene, compelling his eviction from the restaurant and giving rise to an issue, made much of in the press at the time. The belief in some quarters is that he did this for publicity purposes and to arouse negroes throughout the country through press accounts of his eviction from the Capitol and the refusal of Capitol authorities to permit him to eat in the restaurant there.
Mr. Forster advises that Walter White, before President Roosevelt came to the White House, because of his activities, has been one of the worst and most continuous of troublemakers.
Stephen Early
Eleanor, who was in Campobello, immediately wrote Early in defense of White:
I realize perfectly that he has an obsession on the lynching question and I do not doubt that he has been a great nuisance with his telegrams and letters, both now and in previous administrations. However, reading the papers in the last few weeks, does not give you the feeling that the filibuster on the lynching bill did any good to the situation and if I were colored, I think I should have about the same obsession that he has.
I do not think he means to be rude or insulting. It is the same complex which a great many people belonging to minority groups have, particularly martyrs. The type of thing which would make him get himself arrested in the Senate Restaurant is probably an inferiority complex which he tries to combat and which makes him far more aggressive than if he felt equality. It is worse with Walter White because he is almost white. If you ever talked to him, and knew him, I think you would feel as I do. He really is a very fine person with the sorrows of his people close to his heart.
E. R.16
She realized that her racial beliefs upset Early and McIntyre. “They were afraid,” she later wrote, “that I would hurt my husband politically and socially. . . . There was no use in my trying to explain, because our basic values were very different, and since I was fond of them, I thought it better to preserve the amenities in our daily contacts.”17 By and large it was true that Roosevelt did not attempt to rein her in and that the activities she carried on in the field of welfare and race were with his knowledge and agreement. But there were times when her persistence annoyed him, and this, to judge by Early’s memorandum, was one of them.
Early’s hostility toward Negroes and Roosevelt’s concern to protect his southern political flank were demonstrated again in September when Eleanor had Tommy submit a request from a Negro reporter to be allowed to attend her press conferences. She should not answer it, Early advised Tommy: “I have taken care of the Negro requests for the President’s press conferences and if Mrs. Roosevelt opens hers it just makes the President more vulnerable. I think it is far the best thing to ignore the letter.” Eleanor complied. Inside the White House she prodded, argued, and appealed to Franklin’s better nature, but when he laid down the law, she generally let the matter rest there.18
Not always. If the purpose of the Early memorandum was to reduce White’s access to the White House, she declined to understand it as such. But she was circumspect. She knew her activities were being exploited in the South by the extremists and demagogues. As early as August, 1934, Barry Bingham, whose father was president-publisher of the Courier-Journal in Louisville and Roosevelt’s ambassador to Great Britain, wrote to McIntyre of one of the rumors that was afloat about the First Lady.
The old propaganda story is being passed around in Louisville to the effect that Mrs. Roosevelt has made herself offensive to Southerners by a too great affection for Negroes. The tale is that she was visiting in South Carolina recently, and was scheduled to make a speech in one of the larger towns. She is said to have ridden to the auditorium, through the streets of the town, in an open car in which she sat next to a Negro woman, with whom she conversed sociably all the way.
Bingham thought the story was a fake, and it would give him “a good deal of satisfaction to know if I am right in saying that not only did such an incident not occur, but that Mrs. Roosevelt has not visited South Carolina in recent months.” McIntyre passed the letter on to Eleanor. It was a hoax, she informed him; she had been to North, not South, Carolina in July, had made no speeches, and had driven into town in her own car accompanied only by Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook and out the same way. “I am very much interested in the Negroes and in their betterment,” her letter to Bingham said,
but the tale that I was scheduled to speak somewhere and drove through the streets of a town with a negro woman beside me, happens to be untrue but I would, however, not have a single objection to doing so if I found myself in a position where it had to be done, but I probably would not do it in North Carolina.19
What had been a false rumor in 1934 took photographic form in 1935. Molly Dewson brought Eleanor a copy of the Georgia Woman’s World, a racist sheet whose back page was given over to a photograph of Eleanor offering a flower to a tiny Negro child. The caption under the photograph quoted New York Representative Joseph A. Gavagan, House sponsor of the anti-lynching bill: “It has been increasingly evident that President Roosevelt, unlike his predecessor, as well as Mrs. Roosevelt, have drawn no color line at the White House.”
“Who do you suppose is financing it?” Molly wanted to know. Eleanor thought it was Governor Talmadge. “I am afraid there is nothing much we can do,” she noted. A later issue of the same paper had a two-column photograph of Eleanor being escorted to her car by a Negro in uniform. The photographs showing her in the company of Negroes, Eleanor calmly told her press conference, were taken with her permission, the last during a visit to Howard University, and the one with the Negro child at a slum-clearance project in Detroit. She did not object to their distribution. He was moved to tell her, Felix Frankfurter wrote from Cambridge, of the pride that he felt as a citizen
that the First Lady of the nation should deal with such a prickly problem in such a simple, straightforward, humane way as you did. I know it’s the very law of your being so to act—and that makes it all the more a source of pride for the Nation. “They know not what they do,” these racebaiters and exploiters of unreason. And you render deep service to the enduring values of civilization by serving the nation as a historic example of simple humanity and true human brotherhood in the highest places.
20
Eleanor never wanted to offend anyone, even prejudiced whites, but she thought it more important to give Negroes the feeling that they were not alone. What did she want her to do, she wrote a woman who had protested her feeding a Negro girl at a Hyde Park picnic. “Surely you would not have refused to let her eat with the other representatives? . . . I believe it never hurts to be kind. Eating with someone does not mean you believe in intermarriage.” She refused to be cowed by the bigots.21
What she did as a matter of heart and moral courage turned out to be astute politics, although that had not been her motivation. Republican hopes to split the South by exploiting the racial issue went unfulfilled. It again voted solidly Democratic despite efforts to portray the Roosevelts as “nigger lovers.” And in the northern Negro precincts the same photographs that had been circulated in the South as anti-Roosevelt propaganda contributed to an historic shift in Negro voting allegiance from the party of Lincoln to the party of the Roosevelts.
But gratitude was matched by growing expectations. More perhaps than anyone else in the administration, Eleanor was cognizant of the explosive stuff that lay beneath the surface of Negro patience and bland affability.
New Dealers who had solutions for almost every social problem shied away from the color issue because they were themselves infected with prejudice. Henry Wallace was typical. Though he was the author of a splendidly forward-looking book, Whose Constitution?, the racial issue left him ill at ease. Will Alexander, whom Wallace had chosen to run the Farm Security Administration, found him “terribly afraid” of it—he “just wouldn’t stand up to it,” and “he was always afraid of Mrs. Roosevelt.” Eleanor, on her side, felt that Wallace lacked sympathy and understanding of the problems of the American Negro, and she knew that he resented efforts to prod the Department of Agriculture to take a more positive approach to the Negro farmers’ needs.22
Of all the members of the cabinet, Ickes, who had been president of the Chicago chapter of the NAACP, was the most stalwart on the Negro issue. In the early days of the New Deal, Will Alexander and Edwin Embree had persuaded the White House to agree that someone be appointed to see that Negroes were treated fairly. Ickes had named Clark Foreman, one of Dr. Alexander’s aides whom Alexander described as a young man “of very great charm” but “very impetuous,” as adviser to the secretary on the economic status of Negroes, his salary to be paid by the Rosenwald Fund. Foreman’s assistant was Robert Weaver, the first Negro to obtain a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. While Ickes was at times as distrustful of Eleanor’s judgment as Wallace, on the racial issue they were allies. Unlike Early, Ickes did not resent it when Negroes like White militantly forced an issue such as eating in the Capitol restaurant. He “took the hides off people who turned away Negroes from the Interior restaurant,” Alexander said. “You didn’t dare take a Negro to lunch at Agriculture.”23
Unless men like White had forced the issue, most of official Washington would have shut its eyes to discrimination hoping it would not rise up to confront them in a way that compelled a choice between conscience and expediency. They justified their noninvolvement by focusing on the substantial gains Negroes had made under the New Deal rather than on the injustice and degradation that still remained.
Eleanor refused to be insulated and shielded from a problem. The more perilous it was politically, the more twisted its roots in history, custom, and law, the more urgent that it be ferreted out, confronted, and dealt with. She received Negro sharecroppers in the White House and visited them in their tarpaper shacks in the cotton fields, and with kindly questions persuaded them to talk about themselves and their needs. After seeing Shaw’s Saint Joan, she remarked on the remorse of the priest in the last scene,
when with his own eyes he saw the suffering he had caused. “I did not know until I saw” is something which every human should recognize as being as true today as it was when people were tortured and burned at the stake. Only by seeing can we save ourselves the same kind of remorse that haunted the wicked, self-satisfied old priest.24
This was what the Negro wanted—that he be seen and recognized as an individual and accepted in the fullness of a humanity that he shared with the whites—and this was what the First Lady understood.
It represented for her an immense inner journey. “I quite understand the southern point of view,” she replied to critics from that region, “because my grandmother was a Southerner from Georgia and her sister had a great deal to do with bringing us up when we were small children, therefore, I am familiar with the old plantation life.”25 Eleanor had absorbed the southern point of view along with her first lessons in reading from her Great-aunt Annie Gracie, who had held the children spellbound not only with her Br’er Rabbit stories but with her description of the personal slaves that she and Grandmother Roosevelt had been given on the Bulloch plantation, slaves who had slept at the foot of their beds and accompanied and served them wherever they went. Eleanor still called the Civil War the War between the States because “those who lose are apt to be more sensitive” than those who win, and while Walter White had sent her Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction, praising it as a different way of looking at the Reconstruction period in American history, she was more influenced by Gone with the Wind, which she sat up several nights reading. The most interesting part for her was “the Reconstruction period. It is so easy to understand why the women of the South kept their bitterness toward their northern invaders.” She still used terms like “pickaninny” and “darky”; a Tuskegee graduate reading the magazine installments of Eleanor’s autobiography “couldn’t believe [her] eyes” when she came across the “hated” and “humiliating” term “darky,” and it was more hurtful because Mrs. Roosevelt, whom she considered “the paragon of American womanhood,” had used it. A little bit on the defensive, Eleanor explained: “‘Darky’ was used by my Georgia great aunt as a term of affection and I have always considered it in that light. I am sorry if it hurt you. What do you prefer?”26
Eleanor admired Walter White, who with his blue eyes, fair skin, and blond hair could have escaped his Negro heritage had he chosen to do so. When White came to Hyde Park, she urged him to bring his wife and sister. She liked to talk things over with him—he clarified situations for her and helped her to see them more objectively. In his moments of deepest despair, White later wrote, when he was ready to give up on the white race, the thought of Mrs. Roosevelt was one of the few things that kept him from hating all white people.27
Mary McLeod Bethune was another Negro who became a friend as well as co-worker. “She’s real black,” a Negro policeman said, “she’s black as a black shoe.” Unlike Walter White, who was born into the Negro middle class, Mrs. Bethune was the fifteenth of seventeen children, some of whom had been sold in slavery, and she came from the rural South. Her mother was a matriarchal figure who sent her to be trained as a teaching missionary. Her heart’s pride was Bethune-Cookman College, which she developed from a few adult classes and which was the center of her life until Aubrey Williams brought her to Washington to direct the NYA’s Division of Negro Affairs. She had “the most marvelous gift of affecting feminine helplessness in order to attain her ends with masculine ruthlessness,” a male colleague said admiringly. She was a great lady, but without Eleanor’s support she could have accomplished little. Mrs. Bethune never came to see Eleanor without a long budget of requests—Negroes to be appointed, a conference to speak at, a Negro housing project to be financed, and, as a footnote, something that she wanted Mrs. Roosevelt to do for Bethune-Cookman College. She had to check into the hospital for two months, Mrs. Bethune informed Eleanor, first to lose thirty pounds, then to be operated on. “I realize how much the inactivity will irk you,” Eleanor responded sympathetically, and she instructed the White House gardener to send flowers with her card once a week for two months to Mrs. Bethune at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. A personal experience with Mrs. Bethune taught her how deeply inbred racial feelings were among whites. She liked to kiss p
eople whom she knew well when greeting them and when saying good-by, but it took some time and a conscious effort for Eleanor to give Mrs. Bethune a peck on the cheek, and it was not until she kissed Mrs. Bethune without thinking of it that she felt she had at last overcome the racial prejudice within herself.28
To Mary Bethune and Walter White, old fighters for their race who had learned to walk warily in the world of the white man, it was new and bracing to have someone else as close to the seat of power as the First Lady thinking of them, worrying about them as individuals. It made the world a friendlier place. But they were veterans who knew when to advance and when to retreat, how to swallow a humiliation with a smile and how to bide their time. A new, more rebellious generation was growing up to whom the dominant fact was not what the New Deal had done for the Negro but what the white race had done to the Negro.
“You do not remember me, but I was the girl who did not stand up when you passed through the Social Hall of Camp TERA during one of your visits in the winter of 1934—,” wrote Pauli Murray, a WPA teacher, enclosing for Eleanor’s attention an angry, defiant letter she had just sent the president: “I am a Negro, the most oppressed, most misunderstood and most neglected section of your population. . . . My grandfather, a Union Army soldier, gave his eye for the liberation of his race. As soon as the war was over, he went to North Carolina under the Freedmen’s Bureau to establish schools and educate the newly freed Negroes.” Although from that time on Miss Murray’s entire family had been involved in educational work in North Carolina, she could not get into the University of North Carolina, which on its application asked for the “Race and Religion” of the applicant. The president had spoken the day before at Chapel Hill, hailing the university as a center of liberal thought and calling on Americans, especially the young people, to support a liberal philosophy based on democracy. “What does this mean for Negro-Americans?” Miss Murray demanded.
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