Then the news came that Germany and the Soviet Union intended to sign a nonaggression pact. The pact was sealed on August 24; Hitler was free to launch his attack on Poland which he did on September 1.
“Some of the statements made in the last few days by various members of the Communist Party in this country seem rather odd,” Eleanor wrote in a letter to Mrs. Strong dated August 28:
I have always felt that, in theory, Communism was closer to Democracy than Nazism. In spite of the realization that Stalin was a dictator and that Russia was going through somewhat of the same kind of thing that all revolutions seems to have to go through, still one had the hope that in the future the theory of Communism would make a world in which Democracy and Communism might live together.
This treaty does not seem to me to be in the interest of peace. It simply says to Hitler, “We will not attack you, so you are sure of having one less enemy. We need your machinery and you need our raw materials, and we are quite willing for our mutual benefit, to have a trade agreement with you. As far as we are concerned, you can go ahead and take possession of any of the other countries that you choose without our help.”
England and France will be in a much more difficult position. Of course, it seems quite possible that there may be in addition to this some secret agreement by which Russia will take her share of any particular country she is interested in controlling.
In a letter of September 5, Miss Strong was still enthusiastic about President Roosevelt, as she had not as yet realized the new orders from Moscow would mean a break with the Roosevelt administration. Her husband, she said—“supposedly a regular Bolshevik—goes wild with delighted excitement over the President’s speeches, and declares that ‘Just two countries, America and the Soviet Union, are the hope of the world.’” It was the first time, she went on, that she had ever heard him enthusiastic over anything “outside socialism and the USSR.” It reminded her of Earl Browder’s views that Roosevelt’s actions, in Miss Strong’s words,
had caused a fundamental revision of the beliefs of the Communists; it had made them for the first time concede that real gains could be made for the working class under a “bourgeois democratic government,” and that if the real democracy of the New Deal could be established, it should be possible to proceed from this, step by step, without violent overturn, to socialism.
Eleanor found this less impressive than Browder’s readiness to accept Moscow’s orders. That was as repugnant as Soviet policy itself: “The thing which is doing Russia the most harm in this country, no matter how much we all of us dislike the Dies Committee,” she wrote, “is the fact that Earl Browder and various other American communists, are discovered not to have been acting as free agents but as directed ones.”24
She was now perfectly clear in her own mind that cooperation with the Communists was impossible. In a few months she would reach the same conclusion about Popular Front organizations in which Communists not only were participants but, as it turned out, the controlling force.
49.FDR ADMINISTERS A SPANKING
A FEW WEEKS BEFORE THE NAZI-SOVIET PACT AND THE OUTBREAK of war, Paul Kellogg, the editor of the Survey, and his wife Helen Hall, the head of the Henry Street Settlement, congratulated Eleanor Roosevelt on the “gallantry” she had displayed at the Model Congress of Youth, “by that meaning your brave faith in them—for you were certainly taking risks in view of the ugly and twisted attacks upon them. You were in a sense putting yourself in their hands.”1
The attacks on the Youth Congress, mixed as the motivations were, had a basis in fact. For several years liberals and Communists had worked together in a mottled array of Popular Front organizations that were united on a program of support for Roosevelt, a strengthened New Deal, and collective security. The alliance had its critics who contended that the real control in the Popular Front organizations rested with the Communists and that the latter, because of their subservience to Moscow, were insincere adherents of the democratic faith and untrustworthy partners in the democratic cause.
The test came after September, 1939. Before then, as the New Republic noted, the Communists had pursued the Popular Front policy so ardently “that one can hardly tell them from New Deal Democrats.”2 For a few grotesque weeks, after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the American Communists, while awaiting clarification from Moscow, made a spectacle of themselves with their successive rationalizations of the alliance. The new directives from Moscow arrived, and the Communists dutifully about-faced. They characterized the war in Europe as “imperialist,” declared that the democracies were as guilty as the fascist nations for its outbreak, accused Roosevelt of plotting to push the United States into it, and called for all-out opposition to Roosevelt’s “war-hunger” program. Neither peace nor the immediate interest of the masses, the Communists continued, could any longer be promoted through “the Democratic Party or any faction of it.” The issue no longer was “a third term” but “a third party.”
Eleanor read the statement with distaste and disbelief. She considered it tantamount to a declaration of loyalty to a foreign power. A group of veterans organizations challenged her on her support of the American Youth Congress. What basis did she have for her belief that its leadership was not Communist? The Youth Congress leaders should not be blamed, she replied, for the statements of Gil Green, the head of the Young Communist League, and Earl Browder, claiming credit for the growth and development of the Youth Congress. The Communist leaders, she said, seemed to owe their “first allegiance” to another country, and it would probably be to America’s benefit “if we should allow these people to go to that country.”3
As for her confidence that the Youth Congress leaders were not Communists, she reported that was based on hours of discussion with them, getting to know them as individuals. She had carefully examined their finances. She had attended their national and regional meetings, studied their minutes and resolutions. She had even sent for the FBI reports. Had groups such as the Legion, who criticized her support of the Youth Congress, been as painstaking and conscientious in their scrutiny?
Many of the witnesses before the Dies Committee cited the Youth Congress as an example of Communist deception and control, but the credibility of the Dies Committee and its witnesses was not very high at the White House. Established in 1938 with the encouragement of John Nance Garner and the votes of the southern bloc, in its first year the committee not only attacked Popular Front groups such as the Youth Congress without giving them an opportunity to reply but, using the technique of trial by headline, helped destroy the WPA’s Federal Theatre and Writers’ Projects. It contributed measurably to the defeat of Frank Murphy for re-election as governor of Michigan. It harassed Frances Perkins for her failure to deport Harry Bridges, the longshoremen’s leader who was charged with being a Communist, and made itself a sounding board for attacks upon the CIO by old-line elements in the AFL. “The Dies Committee was from the outset on the track of the New Deal and all its works,” wrote Walter Goodman in his objective study of the committee’s history.
It was characteristic of the committee that, having obtained the lists of the Washington chapter of the American League for Peace and Democracy, a Communist-inspired anti-war organization, it made the lists public, including the names of 563 federal employees, a procedure that Roosevelt denounced as “sordid.” By this “act of mass exposure, the Dies Committee obliterated all distinctions,” Goodman observed.4
Although the White House shared the loathing of the committee and its methods that was felt by liberals and New Dealers, in late November, 1939, when an official of the Youth Congress telephoned Eleanor in New York City to say that the congress had received a telegram to appear at committee hearings the next day, she urged her young friends to be cooperative and not request a postponement. She was returning to Washington that night, she added, and would talk with them at the station before she left on the midnight train.
The young people, including the author of this book, who as
head of the American Student Union had also been summoned to appear before the committee, were in a defiant mood when they met her at the train. They wanted to use their appearance to indict the committee, not to clear their organizations of the charges of Communism. Eleanor counseled otherwise. “Volunteer information,” she urged, “try to cooperate with the Committee.” The young people seemed like her children to her. “Don’t assume a hostile attitude,” she went on. Even if the committee was unfair, they should be restrained. She would try to get the president’s permission to attend the hearings, she said, as she bade them good night.5
At 10:00 A.M. the youth group arrived in the caucus room. Neither Representative Dies nor J. B. Matthews, who had originally denounced the Youth Congress as a Communist front and was now the committee’s chief interrogator, elected to be present. Representative Joe Starnes of Alabama, a fairer man with a sense of humor, was presiding, and he was in no hurry to call the youth group. Other witnesses were being questioned when without advance notice Eleanor, dressed in green, entered the caucus room alone at 11:15. A southern gentleman, Mr. Starnes stopped the questioning: “The chair takes note of the presence of the First Lady of the Land and invites her to come up here and sit with us.” But Eleanor, who a few days earlier had said that she was willing to testify before the committee herself, declined the invitation to sit with the investigators. “Oh, no thank you,” she replied smiling; “I just came to listen,” and sat down with those to be investigated. The caucus room came alive. The press corps poured in and the moving-picture cameras were set up and focused, but the leisurely pace continued and it was not until four in the afternoon that the Youth Congress was called. Eleanor was still there, having—without premeditation, because she was a friendly woman and it seemed the natural thing to do—“scooped up” the young people, as one newspaper described it, and taken them to lunch at the White House. She now moved up to a press table to hear better.
The committee was on the defensive and Representative Starnes at his courtliest in dealing with the Youth Congress witnesses. He good-humoredly countenanced an appeal for funds that Youth Congress president Jack McMichael, who was tall, blond, a divinity student, and a southerner, managed to introduce in the midst of a discussion of Youth Congress finances. Starnes even permitted a congress resolution calling for the abolition of the Dies Committee to be read into the record; some of its statements were slanderous, Starnes noted, but the Youth Congress had a right to believe anything it wanted: “That is your right as American citizens.”
“I can take six of you,” Eleanor had said at lunchtime. Now she invited the same group to come to dinner and spend the night at the White House.
In addition to the six “guttersnipes,” as someone dubbed them, there were at dinner that evening Melvyn Douglas, actor and militant New Dealer; his wife Helen Gahagan; Assistant Attorney General Norman Littell, who wanted to talk to Eleanor about how to pull the liberals together; his wife; Aubrey Williams, who was regarded with almost as much suspicion as the youth leaders by Mr. Dies; Colonel Francis C. Harrington, the head of the WPA; Eleanor; and the president, who was wheeled in after everyone had assembled in the family dining room.
The president, despite his preoccupation with Russia’s two-day-old invasion of Finland, wanted to hear about the day’s events on Capitol Hill. He punctuated his wife’s and the young people’s accounts with appreciative laughter. Perhaps he could be slipped into the next day’s hearings under a sheet, he suggested roguishly. “You will be welcomed as a Ku Kluxer,” observed Melvyn Douglas.6
“I have two real interests in this situation,” Eleanor wrote in her column for the next day:
One is that as far as is humanly possible, I give to young people whom I know and trust, the feeling that in any situation, particularly a difficult one, they may count on my assistance. My second interest is a desire to observe to what extent the government is not only striving to un-cover un-American activities, but is giving to youth the assurance that their government does not look upon them with suspicion until they are proved guilty, and is anxious to help them in every way to build up the faith and trust in democracy which should be the heritage of every youngster in the United States.7
She did not lightly dismiss the warnings of some of her friends that she might be lending her prestige to a movement which could prove to be communistic. But she felt that the Youth Congress leadership could be trusted; perhaps even more strongly she felt that in dealing with human beings, trust and love were creative and must in time find an answering response. She had attended their weddings, had lent them money, had given them gifts, and she had helped them raise the Youth Congress budget, and found it inconceivable that young people would repay friendship with personal deception. But Aubrey Williams was worried. He did not share Eleanor’s sense of trust and security in the Youth Congress leadership. After dinner, when the president had retired to his study and the youth leaders began a litany of praise for Eleanor’s courage and steadfastness in accompanying them to Capitol Hill, Williams fixed the group with a piercing look and said, “Don’t let her down; it will break her heart.”
Eleanor’s good friend Bernard Baruch was also worried for her. When he had heard the reports of the first day’s session he telephoned from Hobcaw offering to come to Washington to supply her with a lawyer and to pay the expenses of the young people. She had not needed a lawyer, she wrote him after the hearings; “my mere presence created an atmosphere of great gentleness and even the young people needed no assistance.” She did want Baruch to help with the Youth Congress budget, but when he saw her a few days later he had read the Youth Congress resolution attacking the Dies Committee and was quite upset by it. He felt the Youth Congress should have limited its criticism of the committee to its own specific grievances. She passed on Baruch’s views to the leaders of the Youth Congress, but two days later decided she had leaned over too far in seeming to accept Baruch’s appraisal of the work of the Dies Committee, and wrote him so:
I have been feeling ever since our talk that I ought to tell you that I agree with you getting Kuhn and Browder was a valuable contribution. However, on the whole, I think the Dies Committee is doing work which the Federal Bureau of Investigation could do a great deal better. What the Federal Bureau of Investigation discovers has to be proved in court and they have to have real evidence. They cannot just make statements about people and take any amount of time to prove them. . . .
I have a feeling that if we allow ourselves to be so conditioned that we cannot believe in people whom we see and meet and work with for fear that somewhere in the background there may be a sinister influence, we are never going to be able to do anything again. . . . Undoubtedly there are some people in any group that we would not approve of, but as long as the work done is creditable work, I think we must go ahead and help this group.8
The first real jolt to her confidence in the Youth Congress leadership came during the Washington “pilgrimage” in January, 1940. This project had been authorized, as a demonstration of youth’s support of the president and the New Deal, in the halcyon summer days before the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the outbreak of the war. The emphasis was to be on civic education and persuasion, and it was called a “Citizenship Institute” in order to differentiate it from the militancy and sloganeering of earlier demonstrations.
Now the character of the institute was being transformed, but it was being done so subtly that it took a sophisticated observer to detect that it was not a spontaneous recoil at the outbreak of war but a result of Communist manipulation. The passion went out of the Youth Congress fight to revise the neutrality act to aid Britain and France; instead the emphasis was on keeping America out of war. There was a greater stress on liberties, with the implication that it was the administration’s preoccupation with the war crisis that endangered them, as this same preoccupation endangered the continuation of the New Deal. However, such anxieties were not confined to the Communists. Ickes noted in his diary that he had brought up with th
e president the effort of “fat cats” to use the crisis to move back into positions of control in the government. “Don’t think that I am not watching everything with an eagle eye,” the president had sought to reassure him. It was the period of the “phony war” when the war aims of Chamberlain and Daladier were highly suspect and anti-involvement sentiment was running high in New Deal circles.9
At dinner with a few Youth Congress leaders the night before the institute opened, Eleanor told them how her son John, whom she had seen in Cambridge, had asked her to pass on to “Pa” his strong feeling that the United States ought to keep out of the war and not get involved on the side of either the Allies or Germany. John was worried about the way the president’s policies gave the appearance that he was inching the country toward intervention. She had passed on John’s message to the president, Eleanor said, her eyes twinkling as she added that she also noted that it came from his son, not from a Communist.10
Loyal to her Youth Congress friends, Eleanor, who rarely counted political risks, especially when she was dealing with young people, spared no effort to help the institute. She was beginning to be aware of “grass roots” efforts to change the policies of the congress, but she thought they reflected the way young people were feeling, not Communist manipulation.
She organized a committee of congressional wives, headed by Mrs. Garner and the wife of the Speaker, Mrs. Bankhead, to canvass official Washington for free lodgings for the overflow of youth delegates, and she sat at the telephone with George Allen, the district commissioner, seeking some 500 extra beds from hotels, a welfare institution, and Fort Myers, which set up cots for 150 boys. The Monday before the institute convened she had a congressional reception at the White House where the Youth Congress leaders pressed for action on the American Youth Act. She helped the Youth Congress obtain a government auditorium and administration speakers. She persuaded the president to speak to them from the rear portico of the White House.
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