While Churchill dreamed of an Anglo-American condominium, influential circles in the United States, with the Luce publications in the lead, spoke of an “American century.” That concept appealed to Eleanor even less than Churchill’s. “I do not think this is an American century,” she wrote Gil Harrison, who had resigned from the OCD to volunteer in the RAF. “I like Vice President Wallace’s ‘people’s century’ better.” One could not combat the Hitler ideology of Aryan superiority in Europe and expect the yellow and black peoples of the world, including the American Negro, to continue to submit supinely to the same doctrine, she wrote a critic:
What you do not seem to realize is that no one is “stirring up” the colored people in this country. The whole world is faced with the same situation, the domination of the white race is being challenged. We have ten percent of our population, in large majority, denied their rights as citizens. In other countries you have seen the results of white domination, Burma, Singapore, et cetera. You have seen the results of intelligent handling in the Philippines.
It was “heartbreaking,” Walter White told a Madison Square Garden meeting, that the color line at home in the war program was being mirrored in a color-line approach to international strategy, “and the tragedy of the situation is that only a few intelligent and brave souls like Mrs. Roosevelt, Pearl Buck, and one or two others in the white world are wise enough to see the picture as it is.”7
More and more, the duty she had always felt to diminish human suffering seemed to Eleanor to pose the question of whether the sense of human fellowship could transcend the color barrier. There was little that the Negro people demanded of their government that did not end up as an appeal to her, and it was she who had to confront the men in authority with obligations from which they wished to flee; and the guiltier they felt, the more irritated they were with her. A memorandum from Harry Hopkins vividly described one such episode:
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
July 1, 1942
Memorandum
Mrs. Roosevelt called me four or five times today about the Waller case.
This is the case of a negro tenant farmer who had murdered his landlord and been sentenced to death. He was to be executed the next morning.
A lot of pressure was being brought to bear on Mrs. Roosevelt to intervene with the Governor. She spoke and wrote to the Governor some days ago and, indeed, the President wrote a very strong letter to the Governor in effect requesting the Governor to send the man to prison for life instead of killing him.
The Governor had given six different reprieves and the President felt that he could not intervene again. He thought the Governor was acting entirely within his constitutional rights and, in addition to that, doubted very much if the merits of the case warranted the Governor reaching any other decision.
Mrs. Roosevelt, however, would not take “No” for an answer and the President finally got on the phone himself and told Mrs. Roosevelt that under no circumstances would he intervene with the Governor and urged very strongly that she say nothing about it.
This incident is typical of the things that have gone on in Washington between the President and Mrs. Roosevelt ever since 1932. She is forever finding someone underprivileged and unbefriended in whose behalf she takes up the cudgels. While she may often be wrong, as I think she was in this case, I never cease to admire her burning determination to see that justice is done, not only to individuals, but to underprivileged groups.
I think, too, in this particular instance Mrs. Roosevelt felt that I was not pressing her case with the President adequately, because in the course of the evening he was not available on the phone and I had to act as a go-between. At any rate I felt that she would not be satisfied until the President told her himself, which he reluctantly but finally did.
H. L. H.8
She pushed the president and Hopkins to the point of exasperation because she felt that Odell Waller, condemned by a jury of landlords from which Negroes had been excluded, had become a symbol of racial injustice. “Times without number Negro men have been lynched or gone to their death without due process of law. No one questions Waller’s guilt, but they question the system which led to it.” She failed to save the condemned sharecropper, but her efforts in that direction helped preserve the faith of Negro Americans in their government. Walter White, Channing Tobias, Anna Arnold Hedgman, and other Negro leaders came to Washington the night before the execution to hold a death vigil. “The group definitely felt that you had done everything possible and had been a sympathetic friend to all of them,” a friend wrote Eleanor later.9
Yet a few weeks later when her hotheaded young friend Pauli Murray upbraided the president for his evasive attitude on the Negro question, which Miss Murray contrasted with Wendell Willkie’s forthright support of Negro rights, Eleanor rebuked her sharply: “I wonder if it ever occurred to you that Mr. Willkie has no responsibility whatsoever. He can say whatever he likes and do whatever he likes” without having to take into consideration the southerners who controlled the important committees in Congress. Nor should Miss Murray reproach the president because he was not as outspoken as his wife: “Of course I can say just how I feel, but I cannot say it with much sense of security unless the President were willing for me to do so.”10
Her husband’s willingness to have her speak out seemed to her to indicate not only his bigness as a person, but his sympathy with what she was saying. If to more cynical eyes it seemed that with her help he was getting the best of both worlds—credit among Negroes for support of their aspirations without any commitment that might create difficulties with the southern wing of his party—it must be said in extenuation that a more forthright espousal of Negro rights might have made it impossible for him to govern. Certainly the attacks upon Eleanor for her racial views were more savage, systematic, and unrelenting than any she had ever encountered. The war had dangerously elevated racial tension, and one of the uglier manifestations was the Eleanor Roosevelt rumor factory. The whole South teemed with Eleanor stories. One group of such rumors had her registering at a hotel in a small southern town and then demanding accommodations—in one version for four Negro women, in another for four Negro men; another group of stories had her spurning a dinner prepared by “the nice white people” of Tuskegee to go off in the company of “a big black Negro” to a colored banquet; a third variant portrayed her as registering at a small southern hotel and then ordering the bellboy, “Go out and get me twenty Negro ladies, for I must have them to dinner with me.”11
The most persistent and widespread rumors related to the “Eleanor Clubs,” which supposedly cropped up in every state below the Mason-Dixon line. The purpose of these alleged clubs of Negro women was to get Negroes out of domestic service and white women into the kitchen by 1943. The aims of the clubs were said to be more pay, more privileges, fewer hours, and no criticism of Eleanor Roosevelt. Despite the hundreds of reports of the existence of such clubs, neither the FBI nor scholarly investigators like Howard W. Odum were able to find one. The FBI was brought in because some thought enemy agents were disseminating these stories, but Professor Odum in his careful survey concluded that their origin lay in the difficulties white women were experiencing with “the servant problem” as Negro women left domestic service for war-created jobs at higher wages. “Here’s a new one,” Ruby Black reported to Eleanor. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, it was said that Negroes were being hired in the war plants upon presentation of a slip which was written, “Give this man a job. E.R.” Eleanor sent this item to Will Alexander, who was the minorities specialist for the War Manpower Commission. There was a labor shortage in Bridgeport, he explained, and the rumors were being circulated to keep the Employment Service from referring Negro women to defense jobs. “It doesn’t make a pretty picture.”12
In the summer of 1943 tension finally exploded into riot and bloodshed. Detroit was swept by racial strife more serious than anything since the First World War. Thirty-five persons were killed,
twenty-nine of whom were Negroes, and the president had to send in federal troops. The orgy of race violence was triggered by a fist fight in a Detroit park, but the racial bigots blamed Eleanor Roosevelt. In a letter she referred to this:
I’ve seen lots of people, black and white, who are disturbed about the race riots. There seems so little one can do & all agreed I should not go to Detroit just now since anything that happened would be blamed on me. The editorials in some papers blamed the race riots on me & of course that brings floods of letters from the South!13
To accuse Mrs. Roosevelt, wrote the Louisville Courier-Journal, was “an example of the lowest of all the methods used up to this point by people who disagree with the political philosophy of the New Deal.” The causes were to be found in mass migration, overcrowded industrial areas, and “a new birth of self respect among Negroes.” But that was the voice of reason, and at this time even usually sensible men were swept from their moorings by the gathering racial storm. Someone who worked for the OWI told a friend of Eleanor’s in all seriousness that Roosevelt could not be re-elected in 1944 because of his wife’s attitude on racial issues. She had gone to Detroit, he insisted, despite all proofs to the contrary, and in talking to Negro workers on the assembly line had told them to send all complaints to her—she would fix them.14
The southern picture of Eleanor Roosevelt as a racial firebrand had little relation to reality. Ironically, she was criticized in the Negro community because she counseled patience and moderation. She commended to Walter White an article in the Reader’s Digest by Warren Brown which criticized the Negro press for sensationalism and inverted racism:
I have seen a very considerable number of Negro papers recently and I feel that a certain number of them are not very responsible. For that reason I was glad to see that a colored man had the maturity to criticize in as temperate a way as Mr. Brown has in pointing out the faults of the press.
Her approval of the article distressed him, White replied. Brown’s piece was being used to claim “that the grievances of the Negroes are illusory,” and it played into the hands of “the enemies of the Negro and of democracy.” White’s reaction to the Brown article surprised Eleanor: “It seemed to me temperate and fair and mature.” When an interracial group, Common Ground, solicited her opinion, she renewed her plea for journalistic restraint. “At a time when feelings were so tense, I thought he [Mr. Brown] wisely criticized such people as the Reverend [Adam Clayton] Powell who add to the tenseness. I do not see the Negro press regularly but I am often sent clippings and the headlines and articles seem pretty extreme at times.”15
She again affronted the Negro leadership when she wrote an article for the Negro Digest entitled “If I Were a Negro,” in which she suggested, “I would not do too much demanding. . . . I would take every chance that came my way to prove my quality and ability and if recognition was slow I would continue to prove myself, knowing that in the end, good performance would be acknowledged.” With respect to discrimination in the armed forces, which was the flash point of Negro resentment, she wrote, “I would accept every advance that was made in the Army and Navy, though I would not try to bring these about more quickly than they were offered.”16
“Am I to be blamed for asking, and even insisting, that I be treated as a man and a full fledged citizen in the land of my birth?” a Negro pastor protested, deeply pained that so sincere a friend of the Negro people should write in a way that put the Negro on the defensive. She had not meant to discourage the Negroes from claiming their rights, she replied:
In that sentence, “I would not do too much demanding,” perhaps I did not make it clear that I thought colored people were quite right in stating the things they wanted and to ask for them but that when it came to the work of really fighting for them, they would probably get further if the white people who believe as they do, were urged to do most of the fighting and demanding. If it is possible, in the South it should always be done by Southerners themselves because they take it so much better than they do from a Northerner.
Dr. Will Alexander, for instance, can do twice as much with a Southern audience as I can.
In the Army and Navy, I feel that things are moving. They seem to move slowly but the advance in the aggregate has been very great in this war over the last. The Negro is serving in many different ways which were not open to him in the last war. Of course, you are right, they should neither have to ask for nor demand equal opportunity and equal treatment as citizens but I am talking about things as they are and not about things as they should be or as we wish they were. You know quite well there is an Executive Order against discrimination. There would always be “good reasons” for doing things when individuals want to do them. This change has to come slowly from the human heart and it takes a long while to bring about great changes.17
In this era of “black power,” Eleanor Roosevelt’s admonitions to the Negro militants of the forties sound conservative and patronizing. Even at the time, they drew the criticism of the Amsterdam News. “She is putting herself in the same boat with other so-called liberals and ‘friends of the Negro,’” said the News, and wondered “if Mrs. Roosevelt’s regrettable article about Negroes was just another attempt by the Administration to curry the favor and support of the Southerners,” especially in view of the approaching elections. Many southern whites, too, thought she was motivated in her racial views by a concern for votes—but they thought she was bidding for the Negro vote. The extremists on both sides, one in desperate defense of caste privilege, the other in desperate rebellion against a denial of rights, were cut off from that sense of fellow feeling for all human beings that was the strongest motivating force in her personality. What Eleanor feared was a massacre; what she hoped for was that changes might come without bloodshed. Pauli Murray, enraged by the moral neutrality of the president’s statement after Detroit that “every true American regrets” the recent outbreaks of violence, wrote a bitter poem titled “Mr. Roosevelt.”
“I am sorry,” Eleanor wrote after she had received the poem, “but I understand.”18
She understood, and although she counseled restraint she knew that the Negro faced Zionward and she would march with him as far and as fast as she dared. In the wake of the Detroit riots she wrote:
I’m enclosing a column I am filing the day I leave here. It’s the most I thought F. would be willing to have me say. He feels he must not irritate the southern leaders as he needs their votes for essential war bills. I am not sure that they could be much worse than they are. The rest of the country seems to me sadly in need of leadership on labor questions and race relations.19
Her consciousness of color was heightened by Mme. Chiang Kai-shek’s visit to the White House early in 1943. The generalissimo’s wife, one of the famous Soong sisters, arrived in the United States at the end of November to be treated at the Medical Center in New York for the aftereffects of an automobile accident. Roosevelt, busy with the preparations for Casablanca, encouraged his wife to call upon her the day after her arrival, and the two women quickly established a sympathetic and warm relationship. Eleanor found Mme. Chiang to be “a very sweet person” but sensed also in China’s First Lady great strength of character. Mme. Chiang has a personality, Eleanor wrote, which has “impressed itself on her people and made her a real partner with her husband in the most difficult period in China.” In the first flush of enthusiasm for the exquisite visitor from China, Eleanor ascribed to her qualities which were more a description of herself than of Mme. Chiang. To have achieved what she has “she must be tough-minded, certainly no sentimentalist and yet she must have an understanding and sympathy for suffering and weakness,” and she must be moved by “some overwhelming purpose.”20 If the beautifully embroidered clothes, the silk sheets that Mme. Chiang brought with her to the hospital—and later to the White House—if the carefully arranged hair, the soft, silky skin that obviously required much grooming seemed a little inconsistent with the picture of selflessness that Eleanor drew, if the p
eremptory tones that China’s First Lady was reported to use with those about her when Eleanor was not present, indicated a certain mandarin coldness toward the lower orders, Eleanor—although she listened to Tommy’s warnings that Mme. Chiang was not a Saint Teresa in Chinese silk—refused to accept their implications, perhaps because she felt that Mme. Chiang, being a woman, must be an ally in the struggle for equality and justice.
She listened carefully to the tart, occasionally catty observations of close friends like Tommy, Trude Pratt, and Elinor Morgenthau. She herself rarely said anything belittling of another person. “Yes, dear,” was her smiling comment on her friends’ cynical chatter, leaving them to guess whether she was taken in by someone like Mme. Chiang or, in the interests of her own larger purposes, preferred to accent the positive.
The president returned to Washington from Casablanca on January 31. Chiang had not been invited because, the president told Eleanor, Stalin had said he could not meet with Chiang and hope to stay out of war with Japan, but then Stalin himself, in the midst of the battle of Stalingrad, had not been able to come. Their exclusion enraged the Chinese, as Eleanor learned from Mme. Chiang, whom she visited, with a friend, before returning to Washington. The president, to whom she had spoken on the phone, asked her to inform Mme. Chiang that he had obtained agreements from Churchill that would much improve the airplane situation in China. When Eleanor conveyed this information to Mme. Chiang, the tiny figure looked up at her appraisingly, clearly unmoved. Sensing immediately what the coolness implied, Eleanor asked if she had heard from the generalissimo about Casablanca. At first Mme. Chiang refused to say but then in a torrent that mingled ice and fire, China’s anger and resentment poured out.
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