Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  The questions became repetitive. In one shape or another they reduced themselves to the plea that he should press harder for welfare legislation as a form of internal defense. And in one form or another his answer was that “merely shouting from the housetops—you cannot do it that way.” And when he was wheeled out, his cigarette holder jauntily angled, Harry Hopkins and Eleanor took up the defense of the president against the implications in so many of the questions that he did not see the needs of the nation as well as the questioners did. “After all, anybody who has watched him in the last seven years knows he is a pretty good judge of public opinion and where it is,” Hopkins noted, scarcely able to conceal his annoyance. Eleanor broke in: “A year and a half, two years ago, he said every single thing on defense that he said aloud today to individual members of Congress and gave the very same reasons . . . and the reason that he can get them today is that circumstances hit the people of the United States in the head.”20

  It was extraordinary that in the midst of a grave international crisis the president of the United States was willing to devote an evening to the youth groups to explain and defend his policies. Why did he do so? Of course, he enjoyed the give and take of such a session, having for years handled the sharper, better informed questions of the White House press corps. He liked young people and had been comforted by the belief they were on his side, and it disturbed him that they should now be so distrustful and confused.21 While he had questions about the Youth Congress leaders, he knew that there was widespread doubt, apprehension, and cynicism among young people who were in no way influenced by the Communists. His own sons were prepared to do their duty, but in varying degrees doubted that American involvement would have any happier outcome than it had in 1918. It grieved and worried him to see young people turn up in such large numbers at the isolationist rallies of America First. His speech calling for 50,000 planes brought a flood of telegrams, mostly favorable, but he found it striking that most of the 20 per cent who wrote in opposition were members of youth organizations or college students.

  The Youth Congress leaders riding the isolationist bandwagon were not moved by the president’s arguments. Eleanor had been struck by their failure to ask the president questions about his foreign policy and was subsequently outraged when at public meetings they proceeded to accuse him of wanting to send troops to Europe. At Eleanor’s request Ed Flynn lent his home for a fund-raising meeting for the Youth Congress, but because they distrusted the Congress, people either did not come or refused to contribute. Unless the congress clarified its position by passing a resolution that specifically condemned aggression by Hitler and Stalin, Eleanor saw little prospect of its getting funds in the future. Again and again, before the annual meeting of the congress on July 4, she said to the leaders, “You have really got to prove at this convention that there is no outside domination.”22

  She refused to address or even to attend that meeting, despite the pleas of the congress officers. She arranged, however, to get reports from a number of observers, including Betty Lindley, her radio agent, and Thelma McKelvey, an official of the NYA. “We definitely felt that the minds of the delegates were made up before the speeches were given,” they reported to her afterward. “We have absolutely no proof of who may or may not be communists, but there is sufficient evidence to indicate that they hold a strong place in the policy formation of the Congress.”23

  Eleanor still did not believe that the congress officials were Communists, but the resolutions and speeches at the Geneva meeting were along Communist lines and were exploited by Communist groups. She refused to go along with defeatist groups, and when she saw the Youth Congress leaders she advised them to read the section of Mein Kampf in which Hitler gave his methods of sowing dissension in the democracies.

  To Dorothy Schiff Backer, a friendly newspaper publisher who before the Geneva congress had sent her an analysis made by Oliver Pilat of political alignments in the cabinet of the Youth Congress (David Dubinsky had sent her similar information), she had replied, “I do not feel that any one of them are permanently communists and I feel that I should cooperate in helping them solve the questions which really matter to them, because that is what will determine what they think and feel in the future.” After the Geneva meeting, however, she no longer felt she could cooperate with the congress. “Whatever the reasons,” she wrote congress leaders, “some of the resolutions you passed have a close affiliation with communist ideas and it does lay you open to being considered more or less organized and dominated by the communists.” But she still continued to see its leaders privately. She was genuinely fond of them, and, moreover, profoundly believed in the redemptive power of trust and love.24

  Until the Geneva conference, Eleanor had hoped that the non-Communist group in the congress might prevail. She hoped the congress might be salvaged because in a time of crisis she considered it essential that youth’s voice be heard. But as she faced up to the implications of Geneva and as the Youth Congress settled into a “Yanks-are-not-coming” isolationism, which, except for its pro-Soviet bias, was as rancorous and absolute as that of America First, she shifted her support to the International Student Service, which, with her blessing, reshaped its program in order to assist young people who were looking for an alternative to the Youth Congress and American Student Union.

  There were too many constructive things to be done to waste any more time on the American Youth Congress, she replied to questions about her relationship to it. “I don’t think their present attitude is constructive and I don’t have time if I do not think a movement is constructive, to work in it.” She was now totally out of patience with the evasions of its leaders; they never spoke to her about Russia, she noted, but said only that they were followers of John L. Lewis. When the congress sent her its 1940 Armistice Day peace proclamation, she fired back a query: How did it reconcile opposition to aid to England on grounds that it would involve us in war while at the same time urging aid to China? “If conscription for one year is weakening and undemocratic here,” she went on, “what do you think of Russia’s conscript army [three years]?” In December the congress announced preparations for another Washington pilgrimage in February, 1941. They should expect no help from her, Eleanor wrote them:

  I have been thinking a great deal about my own position in all this lately, because while I believe in the complete sincerity of you, and while I respect the way in which you work for your convictions, and therefore feel no differently personally toward any of you than I ever have, still I find myself in complete disagreement with your political philosophy, and therefore with the leadership which you at present represent in the youth movement. I do not think that you represent the majority of youth, but I do think you have a right to try to further your ideas and to express your opinions and you should be heard in every gathering. However, when I do not agree with you, I also have an obligation not to help you and not to appear to agree with you.25

  In June, 1941, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, and two months later the secretary of the Youth Congress wrote the president. “It has been some time since we have had the privilege of talking with you about our program and activities,” the letter blandly started. The Youth Congress had several ideas on how to combat the “appeasement” forces at work in the United States and which were holding back the “strong anti-Hitler sentiment of our generation.” They asked to see the president. Pa Watson attached a yellow slip to this letter on which his secretary typed, “Respectfully referred to Mrs. Roosevelt.” Mrs. Roosevelt sent it back with a white slip, “My advice to you is simply to say that the President is too busy.” The Youth Congress wanted her help, too, for an anti-Hitler youth conference in London. When she refused, they wrote back that she was “badly misinformed” about their views. They regretted their lack of an opportunity personally to tell her about their activities. “You seem to have forgotten,” she replied, “conversations all of you had with me in the summer of 1940, and therefore do not realize the effect that your c
onvention attitude of 1941, and the changed position you had taken since the invasion of Russia has had on me.”26

  She found it impossible to work with them, she wrote a friend. “I asked each one individually whether they had any connection with the Communists, and received what seemed to me their honest denial. I still believe in many of their objectives, but where there is deceit and lack of trust, I can not cooperate.”27

  Aubrey Williams had feared that Eleanor’s experience with the Youth Congress might break her heart, but she was resilient and had a remarkable capacity to learn from disappointment and defeat. Her experience with Communist tactics in the youth movement, she later wrote, helped her to understand and cope with the Communist bloc in the UN.

  Nor was she embittered toward the leaders of the Youth Congress, who were her friends, because of their failure to be candid and honest with her. Although she refused to work with them politically, she let them know that if they got into trouble personally she was always willing to help them as individuals.

  She answered deception with understanding and injury with forgiveness, and at times put mercy above justice and legality.

  * The author has dealt more fully with these events, including his disenchantment with the Communists, in Eleanor Roosevelt, A Friend’s Memoir (New York, 1964). As he said in that book, nothing reported here about the position of the Youth Congress and Student Union leaders in 1939–40 should be construed as an indication of their viewpoint today. Most of the author’s Youth Congress associates subsequently joined the ranks of the disenchanted, either energetically fighting the Communists or lapsing into political inactivity.

  † A term used by Jonathan Daniels in a letter to the author, Jan. 9, 1970, when the latter wrote inquiring if Daniels knew whether a certain matter had been discussed between the two.

  50.THE THIRD TERM

  “IF IT HAD NOT BEEN FOR MRS. ROOSEVELT,” WROTE JAMES Farley of the 1940 Democratic convention which nominated Roosevelt for a third term, “it was doubtful that Wallace’s nomination for Vice President would have carried.” And if the convention had turned down Wallace, Roosevelt presumably would have issued the statement he had prepared declining the presidential nomination. That it was Eleanor who reconciled the mutinous delegates to her husband’s choice of Wallace as a running mate represented high irony, for she was not a Wallace enthusiast and had not wanted Franklin to run because she did not see that Congress would be any readier to give him in a third term what it had refused him in the second, and now he would be carrying responsibility for decisions affecting not only the welfare but the lives of millions.1

  But the irony of Eleanor making it possible for her husband to accept a nomination that she viewed with the utmost apprehension was not the only one of that convention: She performed this service after Franklin had kept her in the dark up to the very last moment about his decision to accept the nomination. This, of course, was the way he had behaved in 1930 when he had decided to make his first bid for the presidential nomination, but unlike 1930, in 1940 there was no Louis Howe to tell her what Franklin was up to and to argue away her fears. Harry Hopkins, who had moved into the White House on May 10 at Roosevelt’s invitation, was in no position to risk the president’s displeasure by sharing confidences with her.

  Personally, she told her friends, she did not want to spend another four years in the White House. Sometimes she was humorous about what was required of the wife of a public man—especially when he was campaigning for office:

  Always be on time. Never try to make any personal engagements. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Never be disturbed by anything. Always do what you’re told to do as quickly as possible. Remember to lean back in a parade, so that people can see your husband. Don’t get too fat to ride three on a seat. Get out of the way as quickly as you’re not needed.

  And when Bess Furman Armstrong went on from these rules to ask her to sum up thirty years as the wife of an officeholder, she said feelingly, “It’s hell,” a reply that staggered Bess. “Strong language comes startlingly from the lips of great ladies,” she commented, “but surely there should be a special dispensation for her of whom it is said—‘She always built him up, and she never let him down.’”2

  In October, 1939, Eleanor took some time out of a busy day to allow a palmist to study her hands. It was not the first or the last time that she had her hands read, but this analysis of her character interested her particularly and she put it in the desk drawer where she kept the special items that heartened and inspired her, such as Spring-Rice’s sonnet on the Saint-Gaudens memorial to Henry Adams’s wife and some lines that Amelia Earhart had written on courage. The finger which showed leadership, the palmist wrote, “is much bolder in your left hand, which shows inherent potentialities, than it is in your right hand, which shows what actually happens. This leads me to believe that many times you’ve had to cramp your style.”3

  What was “man’s chief end,” asked an old friend of Franklin’s who doubted that the president should run for a third term. Each one had to answer that question for himself, Eleanor replied, but perhaps it was “the full development of whatever we have in us.” For herself that was impossible as long as Franklin was in the White House, or so she thought. Too many of the things she did as First Lady she had to do because of his position. In 1939, Tommy informed Emma Bugbee, “Mrs. Roosevelt had 4,729 for meals, 323 house guests, 9,211 tea guests, and she received 14,056, which means a total of 28,319. By ‘received’ I mean groups who are just received and not given food—D.A.R. etc.”4

  By dint of a remarkable vitality, of never consciously sitting down to relax, of being up for breakfast at 8:30 A.M. no matter how late she went to bed, Eleanor managed to combine these social duties with an amazingly varied and useful life. In April, 1940, United Feature Syndicate extended her contract to write “My Day” for another five years, which pleased her greatly, since it was renewed at a time when it appeared highly doubtful that Roosevelt would run again. She had delivered forty-five paid lectures in 1939 and was under contract for almost as many in 1940. In the spring she dashed off a little book on the religious basis of democracy—it was, she felt, the Golden Rule, “the fundamental thing which we must all have is the spiritual force which the life of Christ exemplifies.” Magazines and publishers were prepared to buy whatever she wrote. In April she began a new radio series for WNBC. Her agents should find her a more suitable sponsor, advised Esther Lape, objecting to Sweetheart Soap; but Eleanor needed the money for her many charities and had long decided the benefits outweighed the criticism. She was commenting with “a noticeable increase of frankness and vigor” on politics and foreign affairs, a forthrightness that some interpreted as a sign that her husband did not contemplate another campaign.5

  As the public speculated on whether or not Roosevelt would run for a third term, there were many proposals of jobs for Eleanor. Some wanted her to run for president or vice president. “If you will agree to let her serve your third term,” William Allen White wrote the president, “I shall be for you against all comers. Every time she does anything she reminds me of T.R.” A group of Bryn Mawr alumnae wanted her as president of their college, and the Denver chapter of the American Newspaper Guild proposed that she succeed the late Heywood Broun as president of the guild.6

  There would be no lack of work for her after Franklin left the White House, of that she was sure, and it would be work of her own. At last she might be able to take on a job and see it through to a conclusion. But this was her personal preference, and because she felt it so strongly she kept silent about it, especially after the war began, believing that her husband should make his decision on the basis of the national interest.

  * * *

  AT THE END of an uncomfortable, cold, wet inauguration day in 1937, Eleanor wrote that her only consolation “was that there would never be for us another Inauguration, that this was really the last time here.” What did she mean by that, the reporters immediately wanted to know. Did she
exclude a third term? Third terms had “never been the custom of the country,” she replied.7

  Even before the 1937 inauguration she had begun to press her husband to groom a successor. She knew the temptation of power both for him and for the many officials in Washington who held it through him. As she went about the country, the politicians and officeholders thought they pleased her by their advocacy of a third term. When she spoke in July, 1937, to the Roosevelt Home Club, made up of the president’s Hyde Park neighbors, she thought it time to oppose a third term publicly.

  But this was her husband’s decision to make, she felt, and when she realized, either because he told her or on the basis of her own political insight, that to close the door on a 1940 race would weaken his influence with Congress, she lapsed into public silence and became as adept as he at avoiding the traps the reporters set for her on the issue. Would her husband consider a third term in order to advance the New Deal, she was asked in Philadelphia. “You’ll have to ask him that question.” “But hasn’t he told you?” “I haven’t even asked him,” she replied, cutting off that line of questions. What were her plans after 1940, she was asked in mid-1939. She had no idea where she would be after 1940, she replied. “If you have been married as long as I have to a man who has been in public office for a long time, you will learn never to think ahead and you will make up your mind to accept what comes along.”8