Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  “I have been surprised all along that the President should make this such an issue as he has made it,” Ickes commented in his diary. When he telephoned his friend Senator Hiram Johnson to congratulate him, Johnson told him that “a great many” senators “were bitter in their criticism of Mrs. Roosevelt for mixing up in this fight.” Ickes did not understand how the president, able politician that he was, “allowed himself to become entangled as deeply as he was on this issue. He might have let the Senate pass on it without showing his own hand.”14

  Would the president have made the fight for the court if its adherents had not been able to focus their pressure on him through Esther and Eleanor? He was a convinced internationalist, searching for ways to indicate U.S. concern and interests in events in Europe and Asia. But would he have judged the political risks worth taking? In 1932 he had disappointed the Wilsonians when in pursuit of the presidential nomination he had capitulated to Hearst, renounced the League of Nations, and fallen silent about the court. Have faith in me, he had pleaded then. Perhaps the memory of a wife who on that occasion had refused to talk to him influenced him to make the court fight in 1935 despite adverse political signals. “When you disapprove of something you sit so straight your backbone has no bend,” Franklin had once reproved her. And while the reproof had taught her a lesson and she had subsequently learned to treat political opportunism with tolerance and amused resignation, there still were occasions when she went cold and remote with anger, a prospect from which Franklin shrank. So if Roosevelt’s involvement in the World Court was, as Ickes wrote, “a major political blunder,” some of the responsibility was Eleanor’s. But it was not really a blunder. He would make many efforts before war broke out to turn the country away from isolationism. All would fail, but the fight had to be made.

  The Senate rebuffed international cooperation nine months before Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. It was a bad moment in which to weaken the authority, even if it was fragile and compromised, of the institutions that had been set up for the peaceful resolution of disputes. Yet even so committed an internationalist as Eleanor avoided advocacy of American support for the League of Nations. “I think I had better not speak for you,” she wrote the League of Nations Association:

  I do hope to work for the World Court and I find that the feeling of Congress is so opposed to the League of Nations that those of us who are interested in trying to change the feeling on the World Court had better not be associated any more than is absolutely necessary with organizations for the League.15

  The isolationist tide that ran against the League also engulfed the court. It was, as Franklin realized, a dead issue. The peace movement split, with many of the peace organizations turning from collaborative efforts to prevent the war that seemed to be coming to an attempt to insulate America from that war. The rationale for this shift was provided by the Nye Committee, which had been established to investigate the international traffic in munitions. Eleanor sympathized with the move to curb the “merchants of death,” as the arms salesmen were characterized in the thirties. “Perhaps the first and most practical step that the nations of the world could take would be to buy out the munitions makers and make their business of war supplies a government business only,” she said.*16

  But the Nye Committee did not limit itself to the arms trade. It developed the thesis that the United States had been drawn into the Great War by bankers and munitions makers and that the threat to America’s remaining at peace in the thirties arose not from the growing dangers in Europe and Asia but from the sale of munitions and loans to belligerents. The way to keep America out of another war, the Nye Committee argued, was to take the profits out of war through embargos on arms and limitations on loans, trade, and travel applied impartially against all belligerents. “In the Executive Branch it was evident that no one could withstand the isolationist cyclone,” wrote Hull. Two months before the outbreak of the Italo-Ethiopian conflict, the Senate approved a mandatory arms embargo and denied the president any discretion in its application to aggressor and victim.17

  There was some confusion in Eleanor’s attitude toward the neutrality bill. The resolution was an “achievement” of the peace groups, she wrote John Haynes Holmes, a noted pacifist minister, “but the passage of that resolution does not prevent individual congressmen and senators from coming to the President to try to have a particular product of their district kept off any list which is considered ‘munitions of war.’” That sounded as if she wanted even stronger legislation. Yet she also voiced the hope that when Congress reassembled women would impress upon their representatives that they did not want “any goods whatsoever sold to an aggressor nation which may even remotely contribute to continuance of war.” But what if an aggressor’s design could not be blocked without continuance, perhaps even expansion, of war? She had not faced the choice yet. Although some peace groups recoiled from League sanctions because they felt sanctions created a risk of enlarging the war, Eleanor favored economic sanctions against Italy because she thought they would stop the war and compel Italy to seek redress for its grievances through peaceful means.18

  So she wrote her old German schoolfellow Carola von Schaeffer-Bernstein, who had criticized League sanctions against Italy as “against all laws of God and nature.” The World War had ended the correspondence between Carola and Eleanor, but in April, 1933, when Roosevelt had come to power in the United States and Hitler in Germany, Carola again got in touch with “Dear Totty,” explaining that she had not written in the intervening years because she had been ashamed of Germany’s dishonorable role. But now with the overthrow of the Weimar Republic, Germany had been delivered from meanness and corruption and men with decent points of view had come to leadership. “Can you imagine what happiness it is for us to have our dear black-white-red flag again?”

  Eleanor was astonished that Carola, a deeply religious woman, should have so high an opinion of the Nazi leaders, but, fond of Carola and curious as always to find out as much as she could about other countries and peoples, especially when they held views different from hers, she had replied and kept the correspondence going, limiting herself to chitchat about the family and her own busy life. But now she decided she had better let Carola know exactly how she felt about countries that resorted to war to satisfy what they considered to be their grievances. Carola had asked what right England had to think herself better than other nations and sit in judgment on them, and were not sanctions in fact another form of war?

  “I do not know that it is England’s fault any more than it is the fault of any other country,” Eleanor replied a few weeks later,

  but it does seem to me perfectly ridiculous that intelligent human beings cannot sit around a table and satisfy their needs. Sanctions may be as bad as war, but if they would stop the war quickly, I would agree that it was advisable to use them. A brief period of war is better than a long period such as most wars bring us. Of course this country still feels very much detached from the rest of the world because of its size and distance, but that will not last forever. I would like to see some sane methods for settling these differences adopted.19

  The issue of sanctions versus a mandatory arms embargo split the Conference on the Cause and Cure of War when it met in January, 1936. As the Times reported: “The problem of how this country should cooperate with other nations in collaborative efforts to maintain peace, and at the same time keep free from international commitments, proved a stumbling block in the adoption of a program for the coming year.” This split in the peace movement was papered over by focusing on the aims on which there was agreement—disarmament, the need to unite the peace movement, and strengthening pacific alternatives to armed conflict.20

  These were the purposes of the 1936 Emergency Peace Campaign, a movement initiated by the Quakers. Clarence Pickett, the head of the American Friends Service Committee, persuaded Eleanor to keynote the campaign with a nationwide broadcast. She liked Pickett, whom she considered an adviser without vanity or persona
l ambition, and she liked the way the Quakers validated their faith by good deeds rather than by theological disputation.

  Other Americans, however, took a less favorable view of the Quakers, and especially of their pacifism. An Indiana Democrat protested to Jim Farley that Mrs. Roosevelt’s association with the Quakers through the Emergency Peace Campaign embarrassed them politically, and in response Eleanor defended the Quakers: “They served as stretcher bearers in the war and were in the trenches with the wounded, and never back of the firing lines, and when the war was over they helped to rebuild what their conscience and religion would not allow them to destroy.”21

  On some points she did not agree with many of the organizations supporting the Emergency Peace Campaign, her letter continued. “I happen to believe that adequate armament for defense is necessary. Others may not; but I can join in any demonstration, at least, which has as its object the will for peace.”

  Felix Frankfurter was another who thought Eleanor’s association with pacifists might prove an embarrassment in a presidential election year. He was especially concerned that George Lansbury, a venerated and saintly British pacifist who had just resigned his leadership of the British Labor party because he opposed the use of sanctions against Italy, was to participate in the Emergency Peace Campaign. Frankfurter asked Missy to pass on to the president a paragraph from “a wise English friend” who had learned that Eleanor was to speak on the same platform with Lansbury. This friend thought this a “dangerous enterprise. The Hearst press and others will pervert it, on the score of a pacifist Labor leader butting in to hamper the American movement of defense, etc.”

  Eleanor was furious. She spoke to the president and then wrote Frankfurter. “Many things will doubtless be said with which I do not agree” at the EPC meetings where she would be appearing together with Lansbury, she wrote,

  but I am responsible for my own opinions only and they have accepted these.

  What Mr. Hearst says or does not say seems to me to matter very little. Whatever he has to say has already been said, and so, though I appreciate your correspondent’s concern, will you kindly tell him we will take our medicine and go on doing what things we want to do. The President will not be elected or defeated on anything I do.

  Frankfurter swiftly replied disavowing any identification with the warning. He professed admiration for Eleanor’s courage, praised Lansbury as “an old and deeply valued friend,” and assured her that his correspondent was “a man of singularly fine and courageous character” who shared their contempt of Hearst. “And so,” he concluded, “I am glad I passed on my correspondent’s concern because it gave rise to these superb and forthright expressions of yours which were not new to me, but nevertheless give one courage and a new confidence every time they are expressed.” On this effusive document Eleanor wrote a laconic “? thanks,” which Tommy translated into “I understand perfectly your reasons for sending on the comments concerning Mr. Lansbury and I appreciate all the kind things you say.”22

  The Harvard professor should have known that Eleanor made few moves in the foreign-policy field without checking with Franklin and that in this area as in so many others, she was in effect a double agent—a spokesman inside the White House for the hopes of the peace movement, and her husband’s deputy within the peace movement arguing for realism. It was not a role she could have played if Franklin had not been committed himself to peace and good neighborliness or if she herself had not tempered idealism with practicality.

  Clarence Pickett drafted her speech for the Emergency Peace Campaign, but she turned it over to Franklin, and it was delivered as he corrected and amended it. Pickett’s introduction was a recital in praise of what the U.S. government had done for peace, and even in these paragraphs the president made revisions that turned the speech into an exposition of his policy rather than of pacifist anxieties. Where Pickett had Eleanor saying, “I am glad to take part in the Emergency Peace Campaign which has as its great purpose—keeping the United States out of war,” Franklin added, “while at the same time maintaining reasonable defense for the nation.” To Pickett’s sentence on disarmament, “We have pledged ourselves to build up our naval defenses only to treaty strength,” Franklin added the warning phrase “as long as Treaties are operative,” an addition which would be understood by the Japanese, who had just walked out of the London Naval Conference. Sentences that suggested the failure of the Versailles Treaty and the need for its revision were stricken out, since Hitler was moving toward the denunciation of the treaties that undershored European peace, but a Pickett sentence that urged America’s active involvement in international efforts to redress the grievances of the have-not nations he allowed to remain: “We do not intend to be drawn into armed conflict,” this sentence read, “but we certainly should be willing to use our resources and our unique position to bring about real results in conferences which deal with any questions remotely touching the peace of the world.”23

  Why should the president object to his wife’s participation in the campaign when the keynote address reflected his policy? This was not guile. There was an area of common ground between the peace groups and the administration—the belief that the have-not nations had a case but not one that should be pressed by war and threat of war. Eleanor’s relief that war did not follow as a result of Hitler’s decision to send his troops into the Rhineland was symptomatic of a widespread view. Writing in 1950, Sumner Welles said that “determined action by France and Britain in the Rhineland crisis, would have changed the entire history of the past thirteen years.” But the U.S. attitude, if Eleanor was any barometer, was as irresolute as the British and French:

  I am sure that everyone has been going around with a lighter heart today after reading that Hitler has agreed to join the League in the discussion about the present European situation. I have always felt that in a tense situation, if time could be given for everyone to discuss what was going on before they actually went to war, we might come to our senses. Most of us were taught as children to count thirty before we opened our mouths when we were angry and the same lesson should apply to nations. No one denies that the Versailles Treaty was unjust in many ways and that revisions should be made. It is quite evident, however, that Germany has ignored the agreements under the Locarno pacts, but it seems more profitable to talk this over than to fight it out again to an unsatisfactory finish and to have another peace built on revenge and fears. France remembers previous invasions in this century, and no one can blame her for wanting to feel secure. There never was a time, however, when other nations were ready to see her point of view as they are today. But there is a tendency also to try to be fairer to all concerned, so let us pray that a spirit of fairness and friendliness to all will actuate the League’s deliberations.24

  The sense of the injustice and unfairness of Versailles weakened her response to Hitler’s open violation of the Versailles Peace Treaty. Thomas Mann, at Hendrik Willem van Loon’s suggestion, had been a dinner guest at the White House in mid-1935. The distinguished German exile did not believe compromise was possible with Hitler and felt that it was both too soon and too late for a sympathetic recognition of Germany’s demands, but if he presented this point of view to the First Lady during his visit she was not yet prepared to accept it.25

  Roosevelt, too, still hoped that disarmament coupled with economic appeasement of the have-not powers might be the way to halt the drift to war. A friend called Eleanor’s attention to a statement by General Jan Christiaan Smuts that German proposals for a twenty-five-year nonaggression pact and disarmament offered a real opportunity to the United States to make its influence felt in the world. She brought the proposal to Franklin, who thought it worthy enough to suggest that she pass it on to Pickett, who “might be interested in talking to the various peace organizations about it.”26

  A few months later Roosevelt shared his thoughts about a “great design” for peace with Times columnist Arthur Krock when the latter was an overnight guest at Hyde Park. Rooseve
lt outlined a plan for a meeting of the heads of the great states. “Among the principals would be the Emperor of Japan, the Chancellor of the German Republic, the President of the French Republic, the King of Great Britain, and Stalin (if, which he doubted, he could get Stalin to sit down with Hitler). But, emphasized Roosevelt, the plenary committee would be a small one.” Krock published the story on the understanding that Roosevelt would not deny it.27

  Pickett was elated. “The President’s Chatauqua speech† and now his hint at a conference of ‘heads of nations’ have stirred my imagination immensely as to possible steps toward peace. Despite a thousand diplomatic reasons against the conference idea it is, I am sure, the only adequately sound and dramatic step. Do encourage him to pursue it.” In answering Pickett’s letter, Eleanor informed him:

  Of course Arthur Krock was not authorized to tell that story. The President talked his idea over confidentially, and primarily as an idea, but never for publication at this time. However, he does think, in confidence, that only a small conference of the heads of nations, who really can speak for the nations, will ever take any real steps forward. I think if reelected, he will put through something of this kind if he can get the agreement of the other heads.28

  But were the American people prepared to shoulder any commitment to keeping the peace, which such a conference implied? Educating the American public to the need to make such a commitment was Eleanor’s major concern. She agreed to keynote the 1937 No-Foreign-War Crusade, successor to the Emergency Peace Campaign, because it gave her a chance to plead for U.S. support of international cooperation. For much the same reason Admiral Richard E. Byrd agreed to serve with her as chairman of the 1937 campaign. In June, 1936, when the admiral had lain near death at his advance base in Little America, separated for six months from his men, he had vowed to devote the remainder of his life to peace. The Quakers promptly invited him to head up the crusade. He had a “brain throb,” Byrd wrote Eleanor on the eve of the crusade: the English-speaking nations led by the president should urge upon the world “a six months’ moratorium on conflicting interests and consequent quarrels that appear to be leading inevitably to war.”29