Roosevelt, however, was less interested in a scholarly report setting forth the “Relations of Record” between the two countries, Esther discovered, than in what the committee might do to lessen the feeling of American “church people” against recognition. Curious as to whose views Roosevelt listened to regarding U.S. policy toward Russia, Colonel Cooper one day asked the First Lady, “Mrs. Roosevelt, who is it now who really exercises influence with the President?” She exploded into laughter. “There never is one. Franklin plays one against the other. He is much too canny to be under the influence of any one individual.”
If the report had little influence on the president, it was noted that when Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov arrived to carry on the recognition negotiations he had a copy of the committee’s study in his hand, and after the complex talks ended in the exchange of ambassadors, Thomas Lamont wrote Esther that he thought Litvinov should raise an icon to her in Moscow.10
One subject touched on in the conversations between president and commissar related not to affairs of state but to the relations between husbands and wives with careers of their own. Mrs. Ivy Litvinov, the commissar’s English-born wife, a highly cultivated woman, did not accompany her husband to the United States.
“Mrs. Roosevelt and I regret so much that your wife couldn’t accompany you,” the president said to Litvinov.
“Oh, well, you know. Very active woman, career of her own, constantly traveling, making speeches. Impossible to interrupt what she was doing. Came alone because she is individual in politics just as I am.”
“I think I understand,” Roosevelt commented.11
In 1936 the Soviet government sent a delegation of managers and technicians to study U.S. factories. Two women, Mme. Pauline Z. Molotov and Miss Ludmilla Shaposhnikova, were in the group, and Eleanor invited them to lunch at the White House along with Mrs. Hull, Mrs. Wallace, and Isabella Greenway. The Soviet women were the heads of Russia’s soap and cosmetic industry and were studying American methods of manufacture and distribution. More than 50 per cent of the Russian women, even the farm women, were using the better grades of face soap and cosmetics, the Russian ladies boasted. Neither Mrs. Roosevelt nor Mrs. Greenway used cosmetics, and Isabella could not resist pointing this out to the representatives of the new Puritanism, quickly adding, however, “Of course, you must not judge the other women of this country by Mrs. Roosevelt or myself. I feel quite sure that if Mrs. Roosevelt began to do one eyebrow she would go out forgetting to do the other!”12
One source of information about Russia at this time was Sara Gertrude Millin, a South African writer whom Felix Frankfurter encouraged to write to Eleanor about her newly published life of General Jan Christiaan Smuts. She had been to Russia, Mrs. Millin’s letter said, and it had turned out to be nothing
like I had imagined from the books I had read and the films I had seen. I had many-sided and extraordinary opportunities to see things—met Madame Litvinoff and her friends, newspapermen, foreign ministers, sincere communists, the simple people. I wish happiness only results for them, and I think that if Germany doesn’t attack them they may emerge. But today—just this day—they are the most distressed people I have ever seen—worse off, in my mind, than the natives here.
There’s only America for the hope of the world. Thank God for its President to maintain that hope.13
Another source of information on Russia during the thirties was Anna Louise Strong, indefatigable propagandist for Soviet Communism. Eleanor had her come to lunch at the White House when the president was there and evidently both Franklin and Eleanor enjoyed the conversation. How it went and the subjects covered may be surmised from the letter Miss Strong wrote to Eleanor a few days later. Evidently she had gone straight to the Soviet Embassy to discuss some of the questions the Roosevelts had brought up.
As for Stalin,—after leaving you I saw Troyanovsky, who is an old friend of my husband’s. I asked him if he agreed with the picture of Stalin I gave you. He said: “I well remember Stalin from earliest days,—an unobtrusive youth sitting in conferences, saying little, listening much. Towards the end he would venture a mild suggestion and we began increasingly to see that we always took it. He summed up best the way to our joint purposes.”
Stalin’s authority, Miss Strong went on, arose from his ability to analyze events:
He has refused several chances to make himself the personal “god” of the people. . . . So the President asks whether people in these conferences don’t feel that they “have to” agree with Stalin, the answer is both yes and no. Personal wire-pulling is not, I think, his characteristic, but the painstaking search for the adjustment of each bit of human material into a place where it can function, is. I have even been told by people in a position to know, that it was Stalin who tried to the last to “save Trotsky” against the rising ire of the Central Committee. I don’t repeat this in America, not wishing to lose my reputation for sanity, but I can quite believe it myself.14
In addition to wanting to know how Stalin wielded power, Roosevelt pressed Miss Strong on how the Soviets raised money for their budget. Money did not seem to be an issue in the Soviet Union, she replied. The Soviet problem was time—“to get schools, factories, tractors—quickly rather than cheaply.” She indicated that Roosevelt’s problem was how “to get money from unwilling owners,” but in the USSR the
money problem becomes: which industries shall we run at a loss in order to establish them or to cut costs of basic necessities? Which shall we compel to pay for their plants out of three or four years income? On which shall we profiteer shamelessly in order to use the surplus for health, education and losses of needed industries?
Priorities were assigned.
Eleanor was politely skeptical. She did not understand how the Russian leaders managed to get diverse social groups—peasants, workers, managers, consumers—to act jointly if not by coercion. Moreover, she had the feeling that it was simpler to manage Russia’s primitive economy than America’s sophisticated and highly developed productive machine. “Their problem is simpler,” Miss Strong replied, “because they have no fundamental clashes over ownership, but only clashes over which district or industry shall be developed first.”
“But I see your tragedy,” Miss Strong went on with the presumptuousness of someone who was sure that history was on her side. “The people trust you to use power for their benefit. And you want to do it. But you haven’t power to use. Power resides in ownership of the means of production; the financiers have it, not you. But the people think you have it, and so, in spite of their great faith and your own sincerity, they will grow disillusioned.” She was pessimistic about the future: “The financiers will force you steadily to the right and if you do not go, they will be ready, either through the ballot or by subsidizing veterans, to put in someone who will.” Roosevelt would end up in the same plight as Ramsay MacDonald and the German Social-Democrats, she predicted. Having thus delivered herself of the party line on the future of the Roosevelts and the New Deal, she signed herself a little lugubriously, “with great admiration for you personally and utmost sympathy for the difficulties of your position.”
Eleanor thanked her for her letter, adding, “However, we are much more hopeful than you are.”15
Eleanor listened to Anna Louise Strong, and she also listened to the Quaker relief worker Alice Davis and her friends among the Russian émigrés. She and Lorena Hickok visited Miss Davis, who had moved to Dumbarton, Virginia, while Alexandra Tolstoy, a foe of Soviet Communism, was there. “Mrs. Roosevelt understands everything,” Tolstoy’s daughter said afterward. Miss Davis then added, “When you were here—I remember you questioned whether we would have to go through the same awful bloodshed that the countries abroad are having. I think that the reason we shan’t have to is that you and the President do ‘understand everything’ or at least a very great deal about all sorts of people.”16
Both the president and the First Lady had great confidence in themselves and in the red
emptive power of American democracy, and were not afraid to talk with Communists. Eleanor felt that loyalty oaths were a reflection of fear, and any action motivated by fear seemed to her almost always to end up being unwise action. “Fear is not a constructive force,” she told the New York Herald Tribune Forum in 1938. When the women cheered Representative Martin Dies, whose House Committee on Un-American Activities had just begun its probes of Communism, she wrote Herald Tribune publisher Helen Reid, “I was just grieved that a group of women so intelligent and outstanding could be carried away with and approve so spontaneously Mr. Dies.”
She was gravely concerned by
the constant battle going on between those who would have us fear the communists and those who would have us fear the fascists. You are thrown into the arms of one or the other in order to defeat the opposite trend of ideas. . . . You rarely see stressed anywhere the fact that it is difficult to win a negative battle. Why are we in this country not stressing a constructive campaign for democracy? We need not fear any isms if our democracy is achieving the ends for which it was established but we must fight for something.17
Occasionally she had held back from supporting a movement because it was too closely identified with the Communists, even though its professed purposes were worthy. By the late 1930s, however, she had become less concerned over being tagged a Communist because of Communist involvement in the organizations which she helped.
This was the period of the Popular Front when, because of the rise and advance of fascism, liberals and Communists joined together in defense of democracy and peace. Although conservative columnists portrayed this as a movement of liberals toward Communism, precisely the reverse was happening—the Communists were transforming themselves into militant New Dealers. Roosevelt, despite his stunning victory in the 1936 elections, found himself increasingly stalemated in Congress by a coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats, which kept buried in committee his bills to help the one third of a nation that was still impoverished.
Unable to muster support for his programs through the Democratic party organizations, Roosevelt began to look for allies in the unions and in the organizations that spoke for the ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed. The job fell to his wife; he wanted her to do it, and she wanted to do it. Inevitably it meant increased involvement with the left—with such organizations as the American Youth Congress, the League of Women Shoppers, and the National Negro Congress, as well as the NAACP, the trade unions (especially those affiliated with the CIO), the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.
Foreign developments also pushed Eleanor toward the left. To the more militant liberals, the enemies of the New Deal in the United States represented the same forces of appeasement that had brought fascism to power in Italy and Germany, were in rebellion against the Spanish republic, and were conniving with fascism in Britain and France.
The president felt similarly. “Over here there is the same element that exists in London,” Roosevelt wrote U.S. Minister John Cudahy in Dublin. “Unfortunately, it is led by so many of your friends and mine. They would really like me to be a Neville Chamberlain—and if I would promise that, the market would go up and they would work positively and actively for the resumption of prosperity.”18 Countless committees sprang up, some organized by liberals, some by Communists—to aid Spanish democracy, for Chinese relief, to boycott German goods, to help Jews and intellectuals and other victims of fascism, committees to try to stop war by resisting fascism, not by appeasing it. Democrats of all hues, not only New Dealers, flocked into these groups. The presence of Communists was no deterrent, for during the years preceding the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Communists were considered among the staunchest foes of fascism, as was the Soviet Union, despite the terrible things that were happening inside its sealed frontiers.
The treason trials and purges in Moscow bewildered and horrified Eleanor, as they did most New Dealers. Anna Louise Strong blandly defended the trials:
You asked me what the reaction of the ordinary people in the USSR was to the trial. My husband has sent me some clippings from the newspapers of letters which poured in from the people. I am inclined to think that Stalin made a bad mistake in ever letting Trotsky out of the Soviet Union. The man is really incredibly dangerous, the more so because he has a very remarkable degree of magnetism which sweeps whole crowds of people off their feet. I know because I once gave him English lessons and I am still ashamed to remember how completely he could sway my convictions if he took the trouble.
Eleanor’s reply was a noncommittal thank you. She was equally reticent in her comment on a letter from Marjorie Davis, the wife of Roosevelt’s ambassador to Moscow, who had sent her a copy of the verbatim proceedings of the trials issued by the Soviet government with the comment, “At almost any place that you may open the book, there is much to impress the mind that a tremendous plot existed. . . . There seems to be such a predisposition on the part of the outside press to discount the facts of what the Government was up against, that I thought you would be interested in scanning this book.”19
Dr. Jerome Davis, an old Russia hand who had been dismissed from Yale because of his activities with the American Federation of Teachers, thought he could find out the truth about the trials. He had been in charge of YMCA work in Russia during the war, had administered the prisoner-of-war camps in Turkestan, and had made several trips to Russia after the revolution. The new batch of trials, he wrote worriedly to Eleanor in March, 1938, would make any kind of understanding between the American people and the Soviet Union more difficult. “It will,” Eleanor wrote next to this observation. Davis thought the United States should have an “unofficial observer” at the trials who could report directly to the president, and he volunteered for the assignment:
I knew all these men from my work as he head of the YMCA during the World War. I have personally autographed pictures of Lenin and Stalin. I could go directly to Stalin and get the inside story of at least what he thinks is true. . . . I must say that all these trials make a bad impression on me as I know they must on the public at large.
“What would you think?” Eleanor queried her husband. The Russians would never consider it, he replied. She conveyed this message to Dr. Davis, adding, “I am afraid the world is not idealistic enough as yet.”20
She listened to those who defended and apologized for the macabre proceedings in Moscow, and she also read the documents of the other side. Princess Alexandra Kropotkin lent her Vladimir V. Tchernavin’s I Speak for the Silent, which she read, and Eleanor Levenson, the manager of the Rand School Book Store, a Menshevik stronghold, sent her the “Letter of an Old Bolshevik,” which the school had just published.
“I wish that in some way we could get across to the people,” Eleanor wrote her friend Mrs. William B. Meloney, organizer of the New York Herald Tribune Forums and editor of This Week, “that the thing we really fear and are horrified by in Russia is not the real communist theory which any peaceable people may decide to live under, but the same kind of dictatorship which takes toll of its people through force in the same way as does fascism.” Theoretically Socialism and Communism could be achieved democratically; it was the departure from democracy, the corrupt reach for power of small groups and certain leaders “no matter what explanation they give, which brings about the horrors that we have watched in Russia and in other countries.”21
The Communists in the Popular Front organizations insisted that to look at the Soviet Union and Stalin objectively, not to mention critically, was a disservice to the anti-fascist cause. Eleanor rejected this view and was pleased when the American Youth Congress resolution condemning dictatorships specifically mentioned the Communist as well as the fascist variety. On the other hand, she refused to allow the events in the Soviet Union and the Communist apologies for them to keep her away from organizations in which Communists were active.
The Workers Alliance held a “Right to Work” congress in Washington in June, 1939, to protest
the congressional slashes in relief appropriations. Eleanor accepted honorary membership in the alliance even though she had been told it was a radical group. “There may be some things you believe in that I don’t believe in,” she said, “but I certainly am in sympathy with the meeting of any group of people who come together to consider their problems.” Arthur Krock praised her, saying that she spoke “the enlightened truth, as she does so often, when she told the Workers Alliance that there are two ways in which to calculate the New Deal’s public relief bill which posterity must pay or repudiate. She said in effect it was better for future national health to pass on a purely fiscal burden than one measured in terms of congenital, physical, moral and spiritual disease.” But some columnists, like Frank R. Kent, preferred to ignore the issue of joblessness and concentrate on Communism: “It is almost incredible,” Kent wrote, “that this Communist-saturated organization, whose object is to browbeat Congress and push the government to greater and greater expenditures for relief, should find its staunchest friends not only among the government officials who administer relief but in the White House itself.”22
“I hope you will forgive me if I disagree with you in your feeling that I should not speak to the Workers’ Alliance,” she replied to the inevitable flood of critical letters:
I believe that the people who turn to Communism do so because they feel that it might possibly answer some of their difficulties, and they are usually people who have difficulties.
The Workers’ Alliance is composed of WPA workers, many of them not even able to get on WPA. From long experience I have discovered that when people are unhappy, it is better to give them an opportunity to come into contact, even to ask questions, of someone whom they feel is responsible than to let them feel that they are shoved aside without any consideration. Going to speak to them doesn’t foster Communism. They know exactly where I stand, but they also have a feeling that someone at least near to the seat of government is willing to listen to their troubles.23
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