The International Congress of Women was preoccupied with the cruel news out of Germany, led by Carrie Chapman Catt and her great suffragist friend Rosa Manus, among the first activist women to leave Germany. Manus created a center for Jewish refugees in Amsterdam, kept Catt fully informed, and visited regularly. In Chicago Catt launched the Protest Committee of Non-Jewish Women Against the Persecution of Jews in Germany.
In April Catt had attended a meeting called by several pacifist groups to hear the Foreign Policy Association’s president James McDonald discuss his fact-finding trip to Germany. The next day, 25 April 1933, Catt wrote to Manus: “McDonald described the Hitlerite movement against the Jews ‘as a revolution unlike any other revolution that has ever taken place.” Catt was so troubled, her emotions “so stirred,” that she could “not sleep last night.” If the “world were not so poor, there might be a war immediately.”
Catt worried that Austria would also “turn against the Jews,” as would “other states of Europe, because that has been the case before.” She believed that “Germans are a queer people for when they voted for the Hitlerites they must, in some degree, sympathise with their curious philosophy.”
In Chicago, Catt’s committee organized a petition drive to express “our horror over the mistake the German people have permitted to be made.” From Chicago, the European delegates brought their protest petition to Chautauqua, which ER endorsed.
On 25 July 1933, before an audience of over seven thousand people, ER spoke dramatically about the need for a “new social order” and declared that women inspired all changes in human history. “If you go back a little bit and think of the old cave-dwelling days, I think you will agree with me that the first step probably to a little more comfort and a little better food came because the woman was not quite satisfied with the original cave….” From epoch to epoch, ER assured her audience, women were in the vanguard of change.
In the shadow of London, and with women from the international congress talking about the triumph of the twisted cross, ER called for a spiritual revival, a return to real responsibility: “We must either cooperate together and rise as a whole or go down…. I feel that we should all enlist in the army of peace which is now trying to solve some of the biggest questions this country or any country has ever faced.”
She hoped especially that women would “be the inspiration” to “set new values and give to us a new social justice, a wider mental and spiritual outlook, so that we can look back on this time and say that as women we helped to bring about a real advance in civilization.”
ER was triumphant at Chautauqua, and Anna (Mrs. Percy) Pennybacker, whom ER regarded as one of her mentors, was ecstatic.* She told ER that her “masterly address” and “graciousness to each and every one in that never-to-be-forgotten reception” thrilled thousands of women from all over the world.
After Chautauqua, Hick began her new job. As she traveled for FERA, around the borders and into the heartland of Depression America, Hick reported directly to ER, as well as to her boss Harry Hopkins. Their new partnership helped expand and embolden New Deal activity.
Hick’s first trip went directly into one of the worst centers of poverty and deprivation—the depleted mining areas in Appalachia, particularly Pennsylvania and West Virginia. ER read parts of her vivid reports to FDR, who “was much interested.” Hick’s ability to bring the details of America’s suffering directly into the White House also had an impact on ER’s most personal crusade: the campaign for decent and affordable housing for all Americans.
At home, ER resumed her relentless schedule: She wrote articles, drafted speeches, answered letters, prepared for exciting autumn events to bolster her vision of a New Deal for women. Her work, she wrote, kept her occupied, which was “a good thing.” Moreover it “keeps me away from. Mama, which is also a good thing!” Best of all, ER wrote with enthusiasm, she bought Hick the car she needed for her travels—a used blue Chevrolet convertible. Hick loved her new car, and called it Bluette.
During the summer of 1933, ER took a series of short trips with almost everyone in her intimate circle. It was as if she intended to touch base with each part of her life as her tasks as First Lady increasingly absorbed her.
With Nancy Cook, Tommy, Bess Furman, and several other newspaperwomen, ER took a night train to Abingdon, Virginia, her father’s last healing refuge. She had gone to that corner of southwestern Virginia to meet the people who had known her father and about whom she had been told many stories as a child. At the White Top Mountain Music Festival there was much interest in her trip because her father had lived in Abingdon “for two years when the Douglas Land Company owned most of White Top Mountain. They were trying to develop some mines and do some forestry work.”
According to local legend, Indians held White Top sacred. “Too perfect to be lived upon, it was dedicated to the Great Spirit,” until it was appropriated by settlers and speculators. ER’s father represented the speculators, and the Douglas Land Company was owned entirely by her family. Largely because there was no coal in the mountain, it was spared and unspoiled.
At White Top, ER enjoyed the entertainment: Six-year-old Muriel Dock-ery played the mandolin; octogenarian S. F. Russell played the dulcimer. “One old man brought me his fiddle and told me it had been in his family two hundred years … originally brought over from Europe.”
In that “most beautiful mountain setting,” ER heard the tunes the community “kept alive in their mountain cabins.” From a banjo recital of “Cluck Old Hen” to the medley of songs that began with “the Farmer’s Curst Wife …,” ER was serenaded with a range of ballads and family hymns.
She enjoyed the square dances most of all. They “looked to me far more fun than much of the modern dancing of today.” In fact, she decided to “take some lessons” and from then on promoted square dancing.
After a “delicious luncheon,” ER and her party left reluctantly at four-thirty to catch the night train to Washington. It was for ER a thrilling twenty-four hours, packed with emotion and memory.
ER told the story of her childhood to her traveling companions during the train ride home. “Outside, at stations, people would be cheering, and she’d wave at them with one hand while she gestured to point up her story with the other.”
ER then made her annual pilgrimage to Newport, for a weekend with her godmother, Cousin Susie Parrish:
Newport depresses me, it is so smug. This is like another world…. At Hyde Park and in Washington I feel much closer to the grim realities of life, and all the rest of my life I feel a part of the life of the most insignificant citizen, but here I feel far away, like in a dream. —And they don’t know it is a dream and that soon it will be over.
ER spent the second half of September at Chazy Lake with Earl Miller and his wife, Ruth, Nancy Cook, and a new friend who became important to ER that summer, Mayris Chaney. Blond and effervescent, she was called Tiny by ER, who always enjoyed her vital, warmhearted company.
In August, Earl Miller had brought “two little dancers” he met on vacation in Bermuda to Val-Kill, Mayris Chaney and her partner Eddie Fox. In April, on Earl’s recommendation, they had performed at the White House after the state dinner for sixty in honor of Ramsay MacDonald. They “did some really charming dances” and were followed by “a young Indian girl, Princess Te Ata,” who gave “interpretative recitations” which presented “some of the customs and thoughts of the Red Indians who are so rapidly being wiped out in this country.” In June, ER invited Chaney and Fox to perform for the veterans’ garden party on the White House lawn, which was “a very appreciative and enthusiastic audience.”
That September, fun-loving Tiny Chaney joined ER’s intimate circle. On 10 September ER wrote Hick: “This morning I rode with Earl at 7:30. From 11 to 12:30 I had a shooting lesson. I’m being taught like a prison guard. It is interesting, though, because there is so much more than I thought to learn. I did improve.” Everybody enjoyed their carefree time at Chazy Lake, except Nancy
Cook. While ER and her friends hiked, swam, rode, and played diverting games, Nancy Cook, who looked robust and athletic but was actually a heavy smoker and mostly sedentary, suffered: “I don’t think Nan has ever been through such a test of friendship. She doesn’t like to do any of the things we do. She’s away from home, which she hates, and has to cook, which she used to like, but doesn’t any more.”
Earl was also under par. Often dispirited, and unhappily married, he had fallen in love with Tiny, who considered him a pal and rejected his affections. ER evidently had no idea about Earl’s state of mind and thought at the time that Tiny and Eddie were married. In any case she thoroughly enjoyed her own stay at the camp, and relaxed even as she learned to become “an expert dish washer and housemaid too.” “The weather is fine, and I love it here.”
During the summer of 1933, ER also took two trips that profoundly influenced the future course of her public life.
On 7 August she and Elinor Morgenthau drove to the little town of Saugatuck near Westport, Connecticut, to visit Lillian Wald, who was recovering slowly from cancer surgery at her country home, House-on-the-Pond. Wald had arranged for ER to be with Jane Addams and Dr. Alice Hamilton, who had just returned from a harrowing time in the new Germany. They talked all that afternoon and evening. After dinner, they went to see Lady Go-diva at the Westport Country Playhouse, and they spent the next morning and afternoon in urgent, intense, far-ranging conversation.
With the pioneering veterans of social reform and the international women’s peace movement, ER sat on a lawn chair in the garden above Lillian Wald’s pond listening to the horror stories Alice Hamilton brought back from Germany. For three months she had witnessed the rise of Nazism with Clara Landsberg, who had directed evening classes at Hull House, taught German at the University School for Girls, and was the daughter of a rabbi. It was, Hamilton noted, “a rather dreadful experience” for Clara but she was “endlessly plucky.”
Every woman they knew, everybody they cared about, was already in exile or in danger. Their personal friends, leaders of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which lane Addams and Lillian Wald had done so much to create, were in despair.
Peace leaders Anita Augspurg, Germany’s first woman judge, and Lida Gustava Heymann were in Geneva, as was WILPF director Gertrude Baer. Life partners, Augspurg and Heymann had no plans “to return to Germany and seem to have grown much interested in astrology.” Gertrude Baer was “restless” and insisted “she must go back but it would be useless. She would simply be sent to a concentration camp….”
The “women of the old suffrage and reform groups” told Hamilton “they would never consent to turn Nazi.” Every progressive women’s organization refused to expel their Jewish members, and they were all dissolved, including the General German Women’s Union, General Federation of Women’s Clubs, International Association of University Women, Women Physicians, and the Union of Women Teachers of Germany. Hamilton considered this “really a proud record.” But there was nothing to celebrate. Events had moved with shocking speed, and all women’s work, all independent social work, was crushed. Within weeks the German women’s movement “lost everything” it had achieved, and women “were set back, perhaps as much as 100 years.”
All German women’s groups were replaced by one organization for Nazi women, Deutsches Frauenwerk—German Women’s Work—which had one definition: “To be a woman means to be a mother.” Nazis declared war on “liberalistic-Marxistic democracy” and rejected women’s emancipation as “contrary to woman’s true nature,” mired by “Jewish doctrines of sex equality and sex freedom, which render woman rootless.”
Under Nazism, the state was everything, “and the state needs children, therefore the refusal to bear children is treason to the state.” Family planning and birth control were condemned as Marxist, and un-German.
Unmarried women were redefined as “superfluous women.” There was in Germany “a problem” of 1,900,000 single women. Eventually single infertile women were put into Hitler’s category of “lives not worth living,” “useless eaters.” That category included Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, political undesirables, the mentally impaired and physically imperfect.
ER, eager to have Hamilton present her dreadful testimony to FDR, invited her to Hyde Park. She also invited Carrie Chapman Catt, who spent the summer organizing the Committee of Christian Women to Protest Against German Cruelty and Injustice to Jews and corresponding on behalf of the petition she had introduced in Chicago.
Most women Catt appealed to responded with enthusiasm, including ER, Hamilton, and Jane Addams. She quickly gathered ten thousand signatures. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote: “Of course I am glad to add my name…. How could anyone refuse?”
Several notable leaders did, however, refuse. The chair of the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Evelyn Riley Nicholson, doubted the alleged atrocities, which were denied by her many German friends. Moreover, they seemed to her trivial when “compared with the military program which our government seems now to be quietly, but surely entering upon. What can we do to arouse the people in this country on that issue?”
Catt said that the campaign of denial was part of Hitler’s astounding propaganda. She had received letters that cast doubt on the alleged atrocities, and they were all the same:
As a matter of fact, there has never been anything in the modern world to compare with the scheme of the Hitlerites toward the Jews. It is their intention to push them back into the Ghetto, to rob them of their property and money, to deny them education in schools and universities, and starve them out by not permitting them a means of livelihood. We are well informed about the situation there and I beg to assure you that it is worse than anything that has been told.
But Catt too was “shocked” by FDR’s decision to build new battleships, and agreed that an effort to arouse public opinion against rearmament “should go forward.” Catt thought that the naval buildup had snuck through in the relief bill because it provided “men employment and it gives the steel trust and many other enterprises a new business project with which to proceed … to put thousands on their feet.”
Actually, on 16 June 1933, just as the London Economic Conference opened, FDR issued an executive order to allot $238 million of the NRA’s funds for naval rearmament, including four new cruisers, two aircraft carriers, sixteen destroyers, four submarines, and several auxiliary vessels. According to William Neumann, FDR’s decision kept the U.S. within its treaty limits but agitated a renewed arms race: “The American building program was the largest single construction undertaken by any nation since the end of World War I.” Japanese militarists “used the American move as propaganda” to increase their own military budgets, which had been declining steadily since 1929, since the new ships “would upset the uneasy balance of power in the Pacific.”
Perhaps those ships contributed to Catt’s curious decision that she had nothing to discuss with FDR at Hyde Park, despite ER’s urging. Her refusal to visit disturbed ER, who believed that FDR was eager for all information and was frequently moved to action by the last person he spoke with.
Worried because Hamilton had not yet replied to her invitation, ER wrote to Lillian Wald, who explained that Hamilton was traveling and was delighted that the president “will have an opportunity to hear about Germany that she knows so well…. The Times, last Sunday, August sixth, on the first page of the magazine section, had one story and other magazines are to have contributions from her.
“Having seen her, you will understand that she is acceptable even though a woman, to the faculty of man dominated Harvard. She’s a wise woman. My very dear love to you.”
Alice Hamilton was associate professor of industrial medicine at Harvard Medical School, the only woman member of the League of Nations’ Health Committee during the 1920s, and Herbert Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends. Her ten-week trip was documented by letters to family and friends. Hamilton took copi
ous notes and wrote a series of articles, several of which were already in print by the time she accepted ER’s invitation.
On 25 August, the great pioneer of occupational safety and industrial health arrived in the afternoon with her young cousin Russell Williams, whom she called her nephew and regarded as her son. They went directly for tea at the big house at Hyde Park. After her private meeting with FDR, the president drove Hamilton to Val-Kill for a festive family dinner, and the next morning she breakfasted alone with ER.
In an effort to understand the fearsome transformation that had so disfigured the land of her happy student days, Alice Hamilton was detailed and ardent in conversation with the president and First Lady. One can sense the urgency of her words from her articles and letters, which were filled with bitter observations, thoughtful analyses, grave foreboding.
Hamilton understood Nazi triumphs in terms of Hitler’s simple strategy: At first communists and Nazis competed for Germany’s attention. But Hitler’s supreme genius was to provide Germans with a single scapegoat “for all their ills.”
Hitler especially appealed to the young, who grew up during “the war when the food blockade kept them half starved.” A settlement worker told Hamilton there were many “families in which the children … [never] realized the connection between work and food. They had never had work, and food had come scantily and grudgingly from some governmental agency.”
To these idle, hopeless youths two stirring calls to action came—one from the Communists, the other from Hitler; and to both German youth responded. But Hitler’s propaganda was cleverer than the Communists’, because his program is narrower, more concrete…. The Communist is taught to hate a class…. The Hitlerite is taught to hate each individual Jew. Many young Communists were brought under the banner of Hitler by appeals to national pride and race antagonism, but also by the ideal of a united Germany without class hatred.
Eleanor Roosevelt Page 19