The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny, which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

  The battle over Lend-Lease was bitter and acrimonious, but the bill passed in March. Churchill called it the “most unsordid act in the history of any nation,” but privately feared that the Americans were going to provide too little too late.

  After Hitler sent his legions into the Soviet Union in June, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to extend Lend-Lease to Russia, as well. The Red Army would now be trying to repel the invaders with trucks made by the Ford Motor Company. And when Nazi submarines preyed on convoys carrying American supplies in the North Atlantic, FDR first ordered naval vessels to shoot on sight and then got Congress to arm American merchant ships. Soon, the United States would be engaged in a deadly but undeclared war at sea.

  Members of the “Mothers’ Crusade” swarm Capitol Hill during the Senate debate on bill 1776, the law authorizing Lend-Lease. Their noisy prayers and incessant hymn singing so annoyed interventionist Senator Carter Glass of Virginia that he asked the FBI to see if they had any links to Nazi Germany—and while they were at it, he added, it might also be “pertinent to inquire whether they really are mothers. For the sake of America, I devoutly hope not.”

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  “OURS … to fight for FREEDOM FROM FEAR,” one of a quartet of Norman Rockwell paintings depicting Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” that initially appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. After the United States entered the war, prints of them would be exchanged for $133 million in war bonds.

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  Nazi troops advance across Russia. In the summer of 1939, Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had signed a ten-year nonaggression pact that allowed Germany to overrun Poland and Western Europe without interference from the East. Once that was accomplished, and less than two years after signing the agreement, Hitler turned on his temporary ally and launched Operation Barbarossa, sending three million troops into Russia along a thousand-mile front.

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  An American tank intended for use in the war against Hitler being hoisted onto the deck of a cargo vessel bound for the Soviet Union, 1941

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  The Wrong War in the Wrong Ocean at the Wrong Time

  Franklin Roosevelt faced a threat from the other side of the world, as well, where he feared Japan was about to make good on Theodore Roosevelt’s old prophecy of an attack on American holdings in the Pacific that would lead to what TR had called “one of the most disastrous conflicts the world has ever seen.”

  The Japanese military had been on the move for a decade. They had seized Manchuria in 1931 and invaded China in 1937, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and claiming Shanghai and other major ports along her coast. Now they seemed to be seeking to dominate the whole Far East, threatening vital American, Dutch, and British interests in the region.

  Washington had formally objected to Japanese aggression over the years but did little else to stop it. Roosevelt did not want his country engaged in simultaneous conflicts on two fronts, and Germany seemed to present the greatest immediate threat. To go to war with Japan, he believed, would be “the wrong war in the wrong ocean at the wrong time.” Instead, he instructed his State Department to “baby the Japs along.”

  He did have one nonmilitary weapon in his arsenal: the embargo. In order to continue to expand, Japan needed American strategic materials. One by one, Washington cut them off: steel and premium scrap iron, airplane parts, aviation fuel. When Japan responded in the summer of 1940 by signing the Tripartite Treaty with Hitler and Mussolini, the United States reciprocated by banning the export of all scrap iron as well as machine tools and hinted that oil might be next on the list. Eighty percent of Japan’s fuel supply came from the United States; without it, the Japanese economy would collapse, and her military’s dreams of further conquest would collapse with it.

  In the summer of 1941, the Japanese occupied French Indochina, a major source of rubber, and seemed poised to attack British possessions and the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, as well. To slow their advance, Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the United States and insisted that a government committee approve any further sales of oil. And, as a further deterrent, he dispatched a large part of the Pacific fleet to Hawaii, to the sprawling naval base at Pearl Harbor.

  Japanese troops on the move in China, 1941

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  Chinese civilians killed by Japanese terror bombing in Chonqing

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  Let the Negro Masses Speak

  The growth of defense industries put six million Americans to work in just twelve months, with thousands more signing on every day.

  The focus on defense had begun to revive the economy, and Eleanor Roosevelt shared her husband’s wish to ready the country for the war both feared was coming.

  But she was also concerned that hundreds of thousands of Americans, through no fault of their own, were being left out.

  Firms that had never hired black workers saw no reason to change their policy. “We have not had a Negro worker in twenty-five years,” said the Standard Steel Corporation of Kansas City, “and do not plan to start now.”

  African Americans had voted overwhelmingly for Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, and were bitterly disappointed when the president backed away from what they had thought was a private pledge to end the old policy of segregating the armed forces and to allow black and white Americans to fight for their country, side by side.

  Discrimination in defense jobs was the last straw. In the spring of 1941, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened to bring 100,000 black protesters to Washington on July 1 unless something was done about it. “Let the Negro masses speak,” he said. “It will wake up Negro as well as as White America.”

  FDR feared bloodshed; Washington was a Jim Crow city. Randolph refused to back down. The president asked his wife to see what she could do.

  The first lady had advocated an anti-lynching bill her husband had not felt able to support; had outraged white southerners by visiting black colleges and posing with their students; and, when a Birmingham, Alabama, policeman told her she could not sit among black citizens at a segregated meeting, she had moved her chair between the black and white sections to demonstrate the absurdity of the situation.

  Now, she did as her husband suggested. “You know where I stand,” she told Randolph. But, she went on, the march would be “a very grave mistake … I am afraid it will set back the progress which is being made … towards better opportunities and less segregation.”

  Randolph respectfully refused to back off. His deadline grew closer.

  The first lady persuaded FDR that he had better meet with Randolph and her friend Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Together, they helped negotiate the language of a new executive order. It created the Fair Employment Practices Commission to combat discrimination in defense plants. The FEPC had no enforcement powers. It could only investigate complaints and issue directives asking that discrimination be eliminated. But it represented the first federal action on civil rights since Reconstruction.

  Randolph called off his march.

  When Eleanor Roosevelt got word that her husband had finally signed Executive Order 8802, she wired him, “I hope from this first step we may go on to others.”

  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES A. Philip Randolph at the podium, and a rare poster urging people to attend his proposed March on Washington. The idea for the march had come from an audience member at a 1941 civil rights meeting in Chicago: “We ought to throw 50,000 Negroes around the White House,” she said, “bring them from all over the country … and keep them there until we get some action.”

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  At the Bethlehe
m-Fairfield Shipyard in Baltimore, black and white welders work alongside one another on the USS Frederick Douglass, one of eighteen Liberty Ships named for distinguished African Americans. In 1942, African Americans held just 3 percent of the jobs in defense industries; by 1945 that percentage had nearly tripled.

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  “Mrs. Johnson”

  On June 5, 1941, a new name appeared on FDR’s appointment calendar: “Mrs. Johnson.” Only Missy LeHand and a few other members of the president’s innermost circle knew her true identity.

  Back in 1918, Roosevelt had promised his wife he would never see his old love Lucy Mercer again and she had married Winthrop Rutherfurd, a wealthy widower far older than she. But she and the president had quietly kept in touch. He’d made sure she had a ticket to each of his inaugurations. White House operators had orders to put through calls from “Mrs. Johnson.”

  Now Lucy’s husband, whom she had cared for faithfully for years, had been incapacitated by illness, and Franklin had invited her to come and see him at the White House. Eleanor was away. Lucy was discreetly led in a back way and ushered upstairs to the president’s Oval Study.

  The evening before Mrs. Rutherfurd’s first visit, the president’s personal secretary, Missy LeHand, who had always seen herself as the closest person to the man she called F.D., had collapsed at a staff party. She had suffered the first of two strokes that would rob her of the power of speech. She was put to bed in her room on the third floor of the White House. Roosevelt was wheeled in every day to visit. She did not improve, was sent to Warm Springs, brought back to the White House, and finally moved back in with her family in Somerville, Massachusetts.

  As always, Roosevelt did his best to hide his feelings. But he quietly called in his lawyer and changed his will so that, in the event of his death, half of his estate would go to pay for her care. “I owed her that much,” he told his son James. “She served me so well for so long and asked so little in return.”

  Meanwhile, Lucy Rutherfurd continued to come to the White House from time to time for tea or dinner, and sometimes she and the president took quiet rides together through Rock Creek Park—always when Eleanor was out of town.

  Portrait of Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, probably painted by her friend Elizabeth Shoumatoff

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  The page from the White House usher’s diary for June 5, 1941, in which she first appears under the name “Mrs. Johnson.” The president spent an hour and a half with her that day between visits to the bedside of Missy LeHand, who had suffered a stroke the night before.

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  Missy LeHand in the White House Rose Garden. She loved and admired her boss, but she was also “the frankest of his associates,” the president’s speechwriter Samuel Rosenman remembered, “never hesitating to tell him unpleasant truths or to express an unfavorable opinion about his work.”

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  Making a Get-Away

  All his life, FDR loved knowing secrets no one else knew, and so nothing pleased him more than to be able to sail north undetected to meet for the first time with the prime minister of Great Britain on August 3, 1941. The White House fed a cover story to the press that FDR was simply taking a few days off at sea, “away from the tension of duties which the critical international situation has made unusually wearing.” Even Eleanor was fooled.

  Roosevelt couldn’t conceal his glee when writing to Daisy about it from aboard the USS Augusta, two days later:

  Even at my ripe old age I feel a thrill in making a get-away—especially from the American press.… Curiously enough the [presidential yacht] Potomac still flies my flag and tonight will be seen by thousands as she passes through the Cape Cod Canal … while in fact the President will be about 250 miles away.

  It took four more days to reach the rendezvous point off Newfoundland in Argentia Bay. There, he told Daisy on August 9,

  The huge new H.M.S. Prince of Wales came up the bay with two escorting corvettes and anchored alongside of us at 9:30.… Winston Churchill came on board at eleven.… We all met on the top deck and were duly photographed and then Churchill stayed on board and lunched with me alone. He is a tremendously vital person and in many ways is an English Mayor La Guardia. Don’t say I said so! I like him—and lunching alone broke the ice both ways.

  Their partnership would become one of the most important in history. During three days of talks, Roosevelt pledged more Lend-Lease aid, and promised that the U.S. Navy would help shield North Atlantic convoys from Nazi attack off the coast of Iceland, but he still could not commit American forces to the struggle against Hitler.

  He and Churchill issued what became known as the Atlantic Charter. It called for “the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny,” but also promised a postwar world in which every nation controlled its own destiny, an end to the kind of colonialism Winston Churchill had stood for all his life.

  As the conference at sea ended, back in Washington Congress extended the tours of duty of draftees from twelve months to thirty—but by just a single vote. Had it not done so, it would have dangerously weakened the newly built army.

  FDR, braced against the ship’s rail and holding the arm of his son Elliott, formally receives from Winston Churchill a letter of introduction from King George VI, August 9, 1941. “At last—we’ve gotten together,” the president said. Churchill nodded, “We have.” “There was warmth there on the deck from the start,” one of the prime minister’s aides recalled. (Elliott Roosevelt wears the uniform of a captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps; Franklin Jr., behind the prime minister, was a junior naval officer; all four Roosevelt sons were already in the service.)

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  Roosevelt, Churchill, their aides, and top commanders attend church services on the quarterdeck of HMS Prince of Wales. Churchill chose three hymns he was sure both Britons and Americans would know: “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” and “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Churchill wept as they sang. “If nothing else had happened while we were here,” Roosevelt told Elliott afterward, “that would have cemented us. “Onward Christian Soldiers” we are and we will go on with God’s help.” “Nearly half those who sang were soon to die,” Churchill later wrote; the Japanese would sink the Prince of Wales in early 1942. The slender civilian behind the prime minister is Harry Hopkins, whom FDR had secretly sent to London to arrange the meeting at sea.

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  He Was Always “My Boy …”

  On Saturday morning, September 6, 1941, FDR made an unscheduled visit to Springwood. Sara Delano Roosevelt, now eighty-six, was failing. As always, she was eager to see him. “When my son comes and sits there beside me with the smile that is not reserved for the voters,” she’d once told a friend, “I just look at his face and think it has everything—wisdom, goodness and sweetness.”

  He was rolled into her room and spent the day with her, telling her about his talks with Churchill, talking over old times, pausing only to read dispatches from the White House. Late that evening, she lapsed into a coma. She died of heart failure the following afternoon. A few minutes later, without wind or rain or lightning, the greatest of all the great oak trees on the Roosevelt estate groaned and toppled to the ground. Geologists would later blame an especially thin layer of earth that blanketed a base of solid rock, but those who had known Sara Delano Roosevelt were not so sure.

  She was buried in the little graveyard behind St. James’ Church where her husband had been laid to rest forty-one years earlier.

  Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a friend that while she personally felt “no deep affection or sense of loss” at her mother-in-law’s death, “it is hard on Franklin.”

  It was hard—and whenever he could in the coming years he, and sometimes his daughter, Anna, would stop by the grave of the mother who had taught him to believe he would succeed at whatever he set out to do, that no task was too great for him to take on.

  Daisy Suckley understood the depth of his loss. “Tha
t big house without his mother seems awfully big and bare,” she wrote. “She gave him that personal affection which his friends and secretaries cannot do in the same way. He was always ‘my boy,’ and he seems to me often rather pathetic, and hungry for just that kind of thing.… His wife is a wonderful person, but she lacks the ability to give him the things his mother gave him. She is away so much, and when she is here she has so many people around—the splendid people who are trying to do good and improve the world—the ‘uplifters,’ the President calls them—that he cannot relax and really rest.”

  The president’s worshipful cousin had once dreamed of living with Franklin in the hilltop cottage she’d helped him plan. The war and the third term had shattered that dream. But FDR gave her a job as archivist in his new library so that she could be with him whenever he felt the need of quiet, admiring company. And she looked after Fala, the mischievous Scottie that was now the most celebrated dog on earth.

  A portrait of Sara Delano Roosevelt and her son, taken at Springwood toward the end of her life by the Philadelphia photographer Elias Goldensky. “I have always thought Franklin perfectly extraordinary,” she once said, “and as I look back I don’t think he has ever disappointed me.”

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  Daisy Suckley on her fiftieth birthday, photographed by FDR in his Oval Study at the White House. The lion skin on which she and Fala sit was given to FDR by the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie.

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  My Idea of Hell