Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Both the president and his wife found Welles more congenial than Cordell Hull. Eleanor’s relationship with Hull was courteous and cool, as it was with the State Department generally. Hull kept her at arm’s length. Letters that she sent to him were answered in State Department officialese. Once, when she was asked to take part in an international peace broadcast, she wrote on Tommy’s memorandum, “I do approve but tell him the State Dept. wld have a fit if I said anything.” She considered the department stuffy. When a vice-consul in Latin America asked in verse to be allowed to return home and was answered in verse by a State Department clerk, she commented, tongue in cheek: “Somehow or other I had not given credit to any one in the State Department for so much versatility and humor. It is nice to feel that what of necessity must be such a solemn branch of government may occasionally deal lightly with a situation.”1

  But it was not the department’s stuffiness as much as its conservatism that bothered her. Harry Hopkins told her after his trip abroad in 1934 that American diplomats in Europe did not seem to know anything about the country they were in except what they were told by members of the upper crust, and they were not even interested in finding out from Hopkins what was going on in the United States. It was only with the president’s promotion of Welles to the undersecretaryship that Eleanor began to feel a genuinely sympathetic presence in the department. “Sumner’s mother and mine were great friends and he went to school with my brother,” she wrote. “Franklin never knew him as well as I did but appointed him because of his abilities. . . . I think Sumner was very much in sympathy with what Franklin wanted to do.”2

  Welles proposed that the president call the Diplomatic Corps together on Armistice Day and broach the conference idea as part of a dramatic appeal for peace. The president was enthusiastic, but Hull violently opposed such “pyrotechnics.” Roosevelt gave up the Armistice Day appeal but wanted to go ahead with the conference. When Welles saw Roosevelt he found him “harassed and irritated” by Hull’s relentless objections. Hull finally agreed on the condition that British Prime Minister Chamberlain would be consulted first.3

  It was about this time that Eleanor spoke to the annual Conference on the Cause and Cure of War, where she pushed the conference idea: “If we are going to have peace in the world we will have to find machinery to draw us together and make us function together and we have got to find a way by which we can actually attack the problems before they reach the point where people will want to go to war about them. . . . I don’t think leadership lies along the path of isolation.”4

  Chamberlain’s reply to the president’s soundings, Welles wrote later, was “a douche of cold water.” The British leader protested that such a conference would cut athwart British efforts to appease Germany and Italy. Winston Churchill thought Chamberlain’s rebuff of Roosevelt represented “the loss of the last frail chance to save the world from tyranny otherwise than by war.” A few weeks after Chamberlain’s airy dismissal of the “proffered hand,” Hitler moved against Austria. Yet even if Chamberlain had accepted, how far could Roosevelt have committed the United States? As Eleanor wrote at the time:

  Of course the trouble is that most people in this country think that we can stay out of wars in other parts of the world. Even if we stay out of it and save our own skins, we cannot escape the conditions which will undoubtedly exist in other parts of the world and which will react against us. That is something which I have preached from coast to coast on deaf ears I fear. We are all of us selfish—note Mr. Hoover’s statement on his return from Europe—and if we can save our own skins, the rest of the world can go. The best thing we can do is to realize nobody can save his own skin alone. We must all hang together.5

  With Austria annexed Hitler began his moves against Czechoslovakia. In September the crisis came to a head. Chamberlain, believing Hitler could be appeased, flew to Berchtesgaden to confer with him. Although earlier in the year Eleanor had seemed to feel the time had come to stand up to the dictators, she recoiled from the prospect of war:

  I open the newspapers every day with a feeling of dread and I turn on the radio to listen to the last news broadcast at night, half afraid to hear that the catastrophe of war has again fallen on Europe. It seems to me that the Prime Minister of England did a fine thing when he went to visit the German Chancellor in a last effort to prevent bloodshed. It seems insanity to me to try to settle the difficult problems of today by the unsatisfactory method of going to war. If you kill half the youth of a continent, the problem will be no nearer a solution, but the human race will be that much the poorer.6

  The British and French effort to resolve the crisis peacefully in effect reduced itself to an attempt to settle it at the expense of Czechoslovakia. The Czechs stood firm. Hitler threatened to march. “I thought as I looked at the pictures of the French Reservists leaving,” Eleanor wrote, “how terrible it must be for those who remember 1914. How incredibly stupid it was for us to resort to force again!”7

  Such pleas for peace played into the hands of the forces personified by Chamberlain who were prepared to sell Czechoslovakia down the river. It needs to be said, however, that responsible American leaders were in no position to urge Britain and France to stand up to Hitler when they knew the United States was not prepared to support the democracies if the result should be war. “The poor Zchecks! [sic],” Eleanor wrote her husband from Cousin Susie’s, where “the quiet and calm” seemed “like another world. . . . I don’t somehow like the role of England & France, do you? We can say nothing however for we wouldn’t go to war for someone else.”8

  She read Thomas Mann’s The Coming Victory of Democracy. The great humanist’s quietly stated argument that force had to be met with force left her unsettled and confused. “I am sure that he feels as I do that the World War and the attempts which we made at permanent settlements really left us with the seeds of the present complicated international situation,” she wrote. Little had been done in the years since Versailles to correct its injustices. “Now, too late perhaps, we are conscious of this need when the world is faced again with the alternative of using force and building the same bitterness that we built up before, or else of allowing those nations which believe exclusively in force, to have everything their own way.” Mann felt that “force must be met with force, but that is what we have been doing from generation to generation.” She speculated on whether the world was witness again to another shift in the balance of power, or whether more was at stake. “It is very difficult for me to think this situation through. If we decide again that force must be met with force, then is it the moral right for any group of people who believe that certain ideas must triumph, to hold back from the conflict?”9

  That was the critical question for her. If there was war, what was the United States? What was she prepared to do?

  The British and the French had appealed to Roosevelt to use his influence to bring about a peaceful resolution of the crisis. An Allenswood classmate who moved in Court circles cabled from England:

  DEAR ELEANOR ONE WORD FROM AMERICA WILL SAVE

  EUROPE.

  YOUR SCHOOLFELLOW MARGUERITE FEW ONCE BAXTER

  Eleanor replied that she wished she knew “what the one word is which America could say to avert war. We are all deeply concerned but you seem to have a mad man in Europe who does not care how many people are killed.” With the United States not prepared to intervene on the side of the democracies, Roosevelt could scarcely refuse to make the one move that was open to him. He cabled Hitler, Chamberlain, Daladier, and Beneš urging the parties “not to break off negotiations,” stating that there was “no problem so difficult or so pressing for a solution” that it could not be settled by pacific methods.10

  Beneš, Chamberlain, and Daladier promptly expressed their agreement with Roosevelt that the issue could be settled peacefully. But Hitler’s reply, when it finally arrived, rehearsed Germany’s case against Versailles and the League and ended on the chilling note that the responsibility rested “with the
Czechoslovakian Government alone, to decide whether it wants peace or war.” Roosevelt sent another appeal to Hitler. Eleanor was handed a copy, and she underlined the paragraph reading: “Present negotiation still stand open. . . . Should the need for supplementing them become evident, nothing stands in the way of widening their scope into a conference of all the nations directly interested in the present controversy.” Next to the words “the nations directly interested,” she wrote, “Are we?”

  The question did not have to be answered because the next day Hitler invited Chamberlain, Daladier, and Mussolini to Munich. “In company with many people through out the world,” Eleanor wrote that day,

  I breathe again this afternoon in the hope that this meeting in Munich may bring about peace instead of war. It may be harder to work out problems in a peaceful way, but it certainly seems to me worth the effort, for things which are imposed by force rarely are satisfactory.11

  Her sense of relief was not unmixed:

  I can not help wondering, however, whether the patient in this case when he comes to and finds himself minus some arms and legs will not feel rather sad at having had them removed without being allowed a consultation.12

  She was having great difficulty sorting out her ideas. The threat of war had lifted, but she disliked intensely the fact that the great powers had forced a small nation to submit, invoking a principle of self-determination they were unwilling to apply to themselves.

  Here the British, together with some others, have decided that the Sudeten Germans should have the deciding voice as to what country they wish to belong, and lo and behold, Palestine has a revolt. Perhaps they want to vote, and the Irish seem to have caught the fever and shall we be hearing from a few other peoples soon, I wonder? A complicated world, isn’t it.

  But in writing to her Allenswood classmate, Helen Gifford, she was less positive about the rights and wrongs of the Sudeten issue:

  I feel with you that things are not definitely settled and I can well imagine that Mlle. Souvestre with her feelings about minorities might be very unhappy. However, I cannot help being glad that the countries involved did not send thousands of young people to be killed over this particular question. Czechoslovakia was set up in an arbitrary way and my whole feeling is that the question should have been discussed in a calm atmosphere and not at the point of a pistol.13

  Another Allenswood classmate, “Bennett,” wrote that she was relieved that war had been averted, but confessed that she was baffled by Carola, who had written enthusiastically about her son being in the German army.

  and oh what a wonderful thought it was that he might give his life for his country. I may be unpatriotic, but I have not the slightest desire that my own sons should give their lives either for their own or anyone else’s country if it can possibly be avoided! Indeed my chief feeling about Chamberlain’s achievement is the deepest gratitude that they are not doing it now.

  “Of course all you say about Carola is true,” Eleanor replied,

  and I cannot say that I want any of my children to go to war and be killed. Hitler has certainly managed to give the Germans a curious psychology, and how Carola can talk about being a Christian and not see the inconsistency of what they are doing is beyond my understanding. I think she realizes this, because I haven’t heard from her in a long while, and we are becoming more and more articulate in this country as to our feeling.14

  She was herself much clearer as to what she thought and less guarded in saying what she felt about neutrality revision and rearmament. A lecture trip in the midwest took her to Wisconsin. “The LaFollettes have been everywhere & are speaking against increased armament,” she wrote the president, “but I had a good audience last night, people standing & no one took exception to my point of view.”15

  America’s isolationism seemed to Eleanor to be nurturing a growing insensitivity to human suffering elsewhere, especially to the plight of the refugee. Her first effort to help refugees was undertaken at the request of the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia, who in 1934 had asked her to talk to the president about a bill to legalize the status of white Russian refugees who still had only temporary visas. Eleanor had spoken with the president, and the bill the Grand Duchess wanted—S. 2692—had been adopted by the Senate and signed by the president.16

  But there were few such victories for the advocates of easing the immigration laws in order to provide a haven for Jewish and other anti-Nazi refugees from Hitler. All such moves foundered on the hard rock of a congressional resistance that was supported by American public opinion. “What has happened to us in this country?” Eleanor asked in her column at the beginning of 1939. “If we study our own history we find that we have always been ready to receive the unfortunates from other countries, and though this may seem a generous gesture on our part, we have profited a thousand fold by what they have brought us.”

  When she wrote this she was in the midst of a new effort to open America’s doors a little wider. In early November the Nazis had horrified world opinion by Kristallnacht (night of the broken glass), when a wave of looting, arson, destruction, and cruelty had been let loose on Germany’s hapless Jews in reprisal for the assassination of a German attaché in Paris by a young Polish Jew. Anti-Nazi and Jewish groups in the United States thought that perhaps in the light of events, which made it clear that the fate of Germany’s Jews was sealed, U.S. public opinion might be willing to support legislation to ease the quotas for children.

  At the end of December, Rabbi Stephen Wise’s daughter, the brilliant and eloquent Justine Polier, who was a children’s court judge in New York and active in the American Jewish Congress, conferred with Eleanor about a child-refugee bill which would provide for the admission of ten thousand children a year for two years in excess of the German quota. She would take it up with the president, Eleanor told Judge Polier. Franklin gave the bill the green light, and Eleanor outlined the strategy to Mrs. Polier:

  My huband says that you had better go to work at once and get two people of opposite parties in the House and Senate and have them jointly get agreement on the legislation which you want for bringing in the children.

  The State Department is only afraid of what Congress will say to them, and therefore if you remove that fear the State Department will make no objection.

  He advises that you choose your people rather carefully and, if possible, get all the Catholic support you can.17

  The bill was introduced in early February, 1939, by Robert Wagner in the Senate and by Edith Nourse Rogers, a Massachusetts Republican, in the House. The supporting committee for the legislation included George William Cardinal Mundelein, Canon Anson Phelps Stokes, Herbert Hoover, Alfred Landon, and Frank Knox. Despite this impressive sponsoring group, the legislation immediately ran into objections from the American Legion, the DAR, and the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, who contended that “charity begins at home.”

  “Are you willing I should talk to Sumner, and say we approve passage of Child Refugee Bill?” Eleanor cabled Franklin, who was on board the U.S.S. Houston in the Caribbean. “Mrs. Roosevelt’s gentle persuasion did not work,” wrote one critic of what he called Roosevelt’s seeming indifference to the fate of the children. It was an unjust accusation, as Eleanor’s letter to Judge Polier describing the president’s attitude demonstrated. Eleanor had talked with James G. McDonald, the head of the president’s Advisory Committee on Refugees, about what the president should do, she wrote Judge Polier,

  and he told me he [McDonald] is in favor of the bill personally, but he has been told that pressing the President at the present time may mean that the people in Congress who have bills to cut the quota will present them immediately and that might precipitate a difficult situation which would result in cutting the quota by 90%, and that, of course, would be very serious. Therefore, the committee hestitates to recommend support of the bill when they do not know whether this will be the result or not.

  I also talked with Sumner Welles. He says that personally he is
in favor of the bill and feels as I do about it, but that it would not be advisable for the President to come out, because if the President did and was defeated it would be very bad. I told him I did not think it was any question of the President’s actually coming out, though he was anxious to see the bill go through.

  I cabled the President and he said I could come out and I could talk to Mr. Welles and say he would be pleased to have the bill go through but he did not want to say anything publicly at the present time.

  Mr. Welles feels very strongly that pressing the bill at the present time might do exactly what Mr. McDonald says, because his desk is flooded with protests accusing the State Department at conniving in allowing a great many more Jewish people than the quota permits to enter the country under various pretenses.18

  House and Senate immigration committees held hearings in April and May, and, as the State Department had feared, restrictionist groups led by the patriotic societies turned out en masse to denounce the legislation as “part of a drive to break down the whole quota system.” At the beginning of June New York Representative Caroline O’Day asked the White House for an expression of the president’s attitude. “File No Action,” Roosevelt stoically scrawled on this query. A few weeks later Wagner withdrew his bill, which the Immigration Committee had modified so that the 20,000 children would come in—not in addition to but against the regular German quota.

  “We used to be more sensitive to human need,” Eleanor had remarked sadly to the Conference on the Cause and Cure of War at the beginning of the year. The defeat of the Child Refugee bill painfully underlined that judgment.19

  An increase in anti-Semitism was another facet of the country’s intensifying isolationism. “As to my husband’s being a Jew,” Eleanor replied to a woman who had passed this on as her friends’ explanation of the Roosevelt administration’s alleged partiality toward the Jews,