Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  There is no use going into a conference unless they have the intention of doing something. This is going to be very bad politically, beside being [wrong] intrinsically, and I think you should ask that a meeting be held and if you can not be present yourself, you should ask them to give you a report and it might be well to have General Watson present.48

  The conference took place on September 27. The president participated, as did Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and Assistant Secretary of War Robert M. Patterson.

  White’s account of the conference, which he sent Eleanor a few days later when he thanked her for arranging it, reflected satisfaction that progress had been made with regard to the inclusion of Negroes in all branches of the Army and an increase in the number of Negro officers, although he regretted that nothing had been said about West Point, nor had any one “even thought of” nonsegregated units in the Army. Colonel Knox’s rationalizations of why the Navy could do little were wholly unsatisfactory, he added, but the group was pleased with the president’s sympathetic attitude, and it had left a memorandum with him embodying the Negro requests.49

  In his diary Stimson gave an account of the meeting which White and his colleagues would have found extremely depressing.50 Roosevelt had asked Stimson to come to the White House to answer what should be done

  to satisfy the Negro politicians who are trying to get the army committed to colored officers and various other things which they ought not to do and I sent Judge Patterson to this meeting because I really had so much else to do that I couldn’t take it in. According to him it was a rather amusing affair—The President’s gymnastics as to politics. I saw the same thing happen twenty-three years ago when Woodrow Wilson yielded to the same sort of demand and appointed colored officers to several of the Divisions that went over to France, and the poor fellows made perfect fools of themselves and one at least of the Divisions behaved very badly. The others were turned into labor battalions.

  Although the president promised to get in touch with the Negro group again, several days passed and there was no word or action from the White House. And when it was finally issued, the White House statement boomeranged. The Negro leadership and press, instead of focusing on the allocation of Negroes to all branches of the armed services, interpreted it as a continuation of the traditional policy of segregation, and salt was added to the wound with the provision that, except for three already established Negro regiments, Negro units would be officered by whites. What particularly outraged the Negro leaders who had participated in the meeting with Roosevelt was a suggestion in the White House release that they had approved the policy of segregation. This not only was false but brought them under fire from their own groups. They demanded that Early issue a retraction. White appealed again to Eleanor, who talked with the president. Early finally wrote White expressing regret that the words he had used had embarrassed the Negro leaders.51

  As the 1940 presidential campaign drew to an end and Willkie seemed to be gaining, the Democratic leaders grew touchy, particularly on the race issue. They were worried about the Negro vote and they were equally anxious not to do anything for the Negro that might further offend the white South. When Eleanor invited Mrs. Bethune’s National Council of Negro Women to hold one of its convention sessions in the White House, Elinor Morgenthau received an anguished letter from, oddly enough, the Colored Division of the Democratic National Committee stating that “it would be well for Mrs. Roosevelt not to have contacts during these weeks before election, with colored groups in Washington which would be given widespread newspaper publicity. . . . It is neither politically necessary nor wise for a group of colored women to appear at the White House at this time.” Eleanor addressed her reply to Oscar Ewing, Ed Flynn’s deputy at Democratic headquarters, stating that the invitation was “a courtesy which had been extended to any number of women’s groups and other groups, where the subject was one of interest to me or to the President. To withdraw that permission would seem to be a great discourtesy which would certainly not redound to anyone’s credit.”52

  If the Colored Division was worried about offending the South, Harry Hopkins was more concerned with the Negro vote in the North, and he summoned Will Alexander to the White House to discuss Negro coolness toward Roosevelt. Ushers rushed him up to a bedroom where Hopkins sat astride a canopied bed cradling two telephones on which he was carrying on long-distance conversations. “Will, this fellow Willkie is about to beat the Boss, and we damn well better do something about it,” Hopkins began, and then recited his worries over the Catholic vote now that George William Cardinal Mundelein was dead and his fear of the impact John L. Lewis’s impending speech would have on the labor vote. Finally he came to the point: “The President has done more for the Negroes in this country than anybody ever did since Abraham Lincoln, and you can’t get a word out of any of them. It looks as though they are all going to go against him. . . . If you can, tell me what to do.”53

  Alexander knew from Walter White, as did Eleanor and Franklin Jr., who had been reporting the same demands from Democratic headquarters in New York City, what Negroes wanted at this point. They wanted Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, who had been passed over on the promotion lists, made a brigadier general and they wanted Judge William Hastie appointed as civilian aide to Secretary Stimson. Alexander so advised Hopkins, and it was done. “Are you crazy appointing a nigger as General in the United States Army,” one indignant telegram to the White House read.

  But the agonizing over the Negro vote was not over. On a campaign trip to New York City with Roosevelt, Early, a quick-tempered southerner, kneed a Negro policeman assigned to guard the president when the officer refused to permit Early to cross a police line. The Republican press leaped happily upon the incident and blew it up to enormous proportions. Eleanor was besieged with phone calls about the need to repair the damage and the distressing effect it would have on the campaign. “It certainly was distressing,” she commented, “but not only from the campaign angle.” But she was loyal, and while she deplored his loss of temper, she assured Early’s critics that “he would have behaved in exactly the same way, no matter who the person was. He has a hot temper.”54

  The Negro leaders knew that they had made significant gains and that their best hopes for the future lay in Roosevelt’s reelection. “We must not let our indignation against the act of an individual rob us of cool judgment,” White said in a statement to the Negro press. And on the Monday before election he sent Eleanor a note: “Please forgive me for imposing upon you so much. But I would be grateful if you would give the President the enclosed personal note of thanks for what he did in the matter of integration of Negroes in the armed forces of the United States.” And to the president he wrote, “I want to send you this personal word of thanks for all you did to insure a square deal for Negroes in the defense of our country. We have worked night and day during recent weeks to take personally to the people the things you did and wrote. I am certain tomorrow will reveal that Negroes know the truth.” He was right. An analysis of fifteen Negro wards in nine northern cities showed that Roosevelt had captured four in 1932, nine in 1936, and fourteen in 1940.55

  Roosevelt was a friend of the Negro, said Roy Wilkins, assistant to Walter White, “only insofar as he refused to exclude the Negro from his general policies that applied to the whole country. . . . The personal touch and the personal fight against discrimination were Mrs. Roosevelt’s. That attached to Roosevelt also—he couldn’t hardly get away from it—and he reaped the political benefit from it.”56

  With Roosevelt’s third term, Eleanor made a quantum jump in her thinking about the racial issue. Although at the beginning of the New Deal she had subordinated desegregation to equality of opportunity and benefits, her approach had now changed. “I have long felt,” she wrote in 1941,

  that many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differ
ences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups.57

  At the top of Roosevelt’s agenda at the beginning of his third term was aid to an embattled Britain. At the top of the black agenda was discrimination against Negroes in the armed services and the defense industries. Stimson was unhappy over Eleanor’s support of the Negro campaign; he blamed a new drive for Negro officers on her, and in his diary scored “Mrs. Roosevelt’s intrusive and impulsive folly,” recalling that she had previously stirred up trouble many times on the race question.58

  Walter White and Aubrey Williams complained to Eleanor about the failure of Sidney Hillman, head of the Labor Division of the Office of Production Management, to do more about the exclusion of Negroes from defense industries. Using a letter from the Washington Youth Council as a peg, Eleanor had a secretary write Hillman quoting the youth group to the effect that “discrimination against Negro youth in Washington has become more serious than ever with the restrictions that now exist against them in the defense program’s activities.” Mrs. Roosevelt wanted to know whether such discrimination did in fact exist, the secretary wrote.59 Of course, Eleanor already knew the answer; Aubrey Williams, for one, had told her. The NYA was training young workers for defense jobs, many of them Negroes, but no matter how good the Negroes were, Williams said, they were not being hired. Labor was as bad as management on this, he added. If Eleanor now wrote Hillman innocently asking for information in order to answer the Washington Youth Council, it was her way of moving into a situation where she knew she had no authority in her own right and where the president was not yet ready to act. It took Hillman eighteen days to reply, and his letter was filled with generalities. Eleanor was not impressed, but using his letter as an entering wedge, she invited the officials concerned with training, defense production, and the awarding of defense contracts to lunch at the White House. The guest list included Hillman, Weaver, Alexander, and Williams, but only the last knew who was coming, since he had advised Eleanor whom to invite.60

  Alexander was Hillman’s “Special Consultant,” but he thought the labor leader “very timid about the race question.” And while Hillman had named Bob Weaver chief of a Negro Employment and Training Branch, it was, said Alexander, a title “but that’s all.” Alexander and Weaver had begun to press Hillman to include a clause in defense contracts forbidding discrimination, but “Sidney wouldn’t touch it. He was afraid of it. I think it was partly [his] being Jewish.” That was in the background when they arrived at the White House for lunch on May 29. Eleanor finished eating quickly—“she never wasted much time on that,” Alexander noted—and in her courteous and disarming way began to report what she had been hearing about employment of minority groups. What was the situation? she asked, turning to Hillman.

  “Well, I’m sure Dr. Alexander and Dr. Weaver won’t agree with me. We haven’t agreed on it,” Hillman began a little lamely. He should state his position, Eleanor said smilingly; then they could state theirs. According to Alexander, Hillman gave “a stumbling explanation.” Progress was being made was his essential point. “Is that your impression, Dr. Will?” Eleanor asked. Alexander’s report was considerably darker than Hillman’s; little would be accomplished, he thought, unless a nondiscrimination clause was written into contracts with responsibility for compliance placed upon the contractors. He was supported by Bob Weaver, who, as leader of the “Black Cabinet,” a resourceful group of young Negro intellectuals in New Deal agencies, knew the situation. His somber, disquieting bill of particulars confirmed Eleanor’s own feeling that admonitory letters to defense contractors were not being effective and that the president was not aware of how bad the situation really was.61

  The Negro community, meanwhile, had begun to act on its own. With the Office of Production Management refusing to budge, with a Senate resolution calling for an investigation of discrimination in defense industries stalled, and with the president unresponsive to requests for a meeting, A. Philip Randolph issued a call for a “March on Washington” on July 1 to protest the exclusion of Negroes from defense industries and their humiliation in the armed services.

  This alarmed the president. Such a march could immensely complicate his situation on Capitol Hill and might even result in bloodshed. Steve Early asked Wayne Coy “to appeal to Mayor LaGuardia to exercise his persuasive powers to stop it.” Eleanor was also enlisted. “I have talked over your letter with the President,” she wrote Randolph,

  and I feel very strongly that your group is making a very grave mistake at the present time to allow this march to take place. I am afraid it will set back the progress which was being made, in the Army at least, towards better opportunities and less segregation.

  I feel that if any incident occurs as a result of this, it may engender so much bitterness that it will create in Congress even more solid opposition from certain groups than we have had in the past.62

  But not even she could sway the Negro leadership. Wayne Coy advised Early that he thought the only way to head off the march was for the administration to support the Senate bill to establish a permanent investigating committee on the subject of discrimination. The president called in Aubrey Williams: “Go to New York,” he ordered, “and try to talk Randolph and White out of this march.

  “Get the missus and Fiorello and Anna [Rosenberg] and get it stopped,” he added. When he heard of Williams’ assignment, Pa Watson commented skeptically, “Hell, Williams will join them.”63

  The meeting took place in City Hall.

  “You know where I stand,” Eleanor said to Randolph and White. “But the attitude of the Washington police, most of them Southerners, and the general feeling of Washington itself are such that I fear that there may be trouble if the march occurs.” When White explained that they had tried unsuccessfully all spring to see the president about Negro grievances, she assured him she would get in touch with the president immediately, “because I think you are right.”64

  After the meeting Anna Rosenberg called Pa Watson to inform him LaGuardia’s recommendation was that the president bring in Stimson, Knox, William S. Knudsen, and Hillman to meet with White and Randolph. “Fiorello thinks this will stop the march and nothing else will, except the President’s presence and direction. . . . Anna, at the same time, said Mrs. Roosevelt was in full agreement with the Mayor as to the joint meeting.”65 That same day Roosevelt instructed Watson: “I will see Stimson, Knox, Knudsen, Hillman, White and Randolph on Friday next—or, if I do not go away and feel well enough, I will see them on Wednesday or Thursday.” Aubrey Williams called Randolph and suggested that he halt preparations for the march “pending conference” with the president. The Negro leader refused, even though he praised Roosevelt for his “fine statement” that day requesting the OPM to reaffirm its policy of the full utilization of available and competent Negro workers in defense industry.66

  The conference at the White House was held on June 18. Before it began the president saw Anna Rosenberg, who had become his link with LaGuardia and who briefed him on what the Negro leaders wanted which was essentially an order that would make nondiscrimination in defense industry not only a matter of policy but of mandate, with a Fair Employment Practices Committee set up to enforce it. The upshot of the June 18 conference was that the president asked the Negro group to meet with LaGuardia, Williams, and Mrs. Rosenberg to draft the kind of order they thought he should issue.67

  The order was drafted and Eleanor, whom Aubrey Williams kept apprised of every move, left for Campobello. There was no electricity in the Campobello house and no phone, and Eleanor had to go a half-mile down the road to Mrs. Mitchell, the island’s telegrapher, and sit on her steps until she could get a call through. She had just arrived on Campobello when she received a telegram from Aubrey Williams saying that he had to talk with her. When she called him he was out.68 Finally when they did connec
t Williams told her that the draft of the order was sitting on the president’s desk. White and Randolph feared it was being steadily whittled down. Williams had urged the president to sign, as had LaGuardia. Eleanor then talked with Franklin, who said these things took time. The draft had been sent over to the Budget Bureau; it had to go to the attorney general. On June 23 Randolph still planned the march and asked Eleanor (even though she opposed the march) to speak at the Lincoln Memorial rally which would climax the demonstration. Finally, according to Williams, spurred on by Eleanor, Anna Rosenberg bought a new hat, marched into the president’s office, fished out the order, and cajoled him: “Sign it, Mr. President—sign it.” There is a memo from Roosevelt to Rudolph Forster, the dignified executive clerk, “Fix up for me a sign & send to Attorney-General for language. Quick.” Robert H. Jackson, the attorney general, returned it on June 25, and it was issued that day. He had been informed, Randolph telegraphed Eleanor at Campobello, that the order was on its way, and he was, therefore, postponing the march. She was glad, Eleanor replied: “I hope from this first step, we may go on to others.”69

  On July 19 the president named the commission, headed by Mark Ethridge of the Louisville Courier-Journal, a stalwart southern liberal. For a brief moment Walter White was content: “I have come to you on so many occasions with tales of woe,” he wrote the First Lady,

  that I am certain there must be times when you dread the sight of me. That is why I am glad on this occasion to be able to report gratifying progress towards betterment of a condition in which improvement you played so major a part. I refer to the way in which the Fair Employment Practices Committee is going about its job. Mr. Ethridge has plunged in with his characteristic energy, forthrightness and courage.70

  White’s euphoria did not mislead Eleanor. After White had spoken to the International Student Service group at Campobello, she confided to a friend that she understood the black man’s urgency. She sensed this “vast issue taking shape and every day coming closer to her.” She had never seen such a seething restlessness among the Negro people. She could see it coming closer to her every day, she repeated, and all of us having to face up to it in unprecedented ways.71