After FDR’s speech, ER hosted the annual reception for the Supreme Court and then boarded the midnight train to New York to attend her daughter’s marriage to John Boettiger. A private ceremony was held at nine o’clock in the morning in the second-floor library of the New York City home that Sara had built for ER, FDR, and herself. Boettiger had resigned from the anti-Roosevelt Chicago Tribune and temporarily became executive assistant to Will Hays, Hollywood’s self-censorship officer. He and Anna rented a small apartment in New York, and Anna’s children, Sistie and Buzzie, remained at the White House to complete the school year.
On the train, ER wrote John a letter that reflected her own experiences as a young wife and daughter-in-law:
I won’t get a chance to talk tomorrow so this is a last word of motherly advice. You know I shall always want to help you both to be happy but never let me interfere & remember that Anna is I think rather like me, she’d always rather have the truth even if it is painful & never let a doubt or a suspicion grow up between you two which honest facing can dispel….
ER signed her letter “L.L.”—for “Lovely Lady,” John Boettiger’s name for his mother-in-law. Charmed by the endearment, she always used it in her letters to him.
ER returned to Washington to participate in one of FDR’s January initiatives, which the Senate took up immediately. For fifteen years, ER had been one of the lonely crusaders for the World Court. Despite his 1932 shabby convention deal with William Randolph Hearst, which was their most enduring public disagreement, finally, on 16 January 1935, FDR sent a message to the Senate:
The movement to make international justice practicable and serviceable is not subject to partisan considerations…. At this period … when every act is of moment to the future of world peace, the U.S. has an opportunity to throw its weight into the scale of peace.
That brief message represented the culmination of a long campaign ER and her immediate circle had led. To secure peace through mediation, negotiation, international law, seemed to ER and her friends Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read the last chance to avoid another round of world carnage.
Fascist terror and rearmament, war in Asia and Latin-America heightened their sense of urgency. Should “outlaw” nations become dangerous, they would face a World Court with influence and authority, able to adjudicate differences and speak with a moral and united voice. They had championed America’s entrance into the World Court since 1920, and in January 1935 their efforts seemed about to be rewarded by Senate ratification.
The World Court represented an ideal the United States had promoted and endorsed in 1899 at the International Peace Conference at the Hague, which established a court for international arbitration. In 1902, TR was the first national leader to submit a case to that court. It concerned a commercial land dispute with Mexico that had “dragged on almost fifty years.” When the Hague ruling favored the United States, Jane Addams pointed out, Americans proudly championed international law.
But in the United States, “isolationism” swamped internationalism after the Great War. Except for international business ventures, any entanglement in Europe’s woes or membership in international organizations seemed to self-styled “isolationists” dangerous, un-American, wicked.
In April 1933, FDR went out of his way to assure California Senator Hiram Johnson that he would not raise the World Court controversy during the “hundred days” special session devoted to domestic legislation. Then came the collapse of the London Economic Conference, and on 14 October 1933 Berlin announced its withdrawal from the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations. The American Foundation resumed its campaign for U.S. adherence. But in December, FDR told ER to inform Esther Lape that “politically speaking … it would be unwise to do anything about the World Court.”
In January 1934, following a conference with the president, Senator Joseph Robinson of Arkansas told the press that “the situation in Europe is so complex that this is not the opportune time to take up the World Court protocols.”
Lape was furious. She and Curtis Bok went to Washington to meet with FDR and present the results of their independent poll, which revealed widespread popular and Senate support: sixty-five senators favored the Court, sixteen were opposed, fifteen were doubtful.
With fascism on the rise and German rearmament well under way, it seemed important for the United States to send a signal of support for international law. Never impolite to ER’s closest friends, FDR told Lape he would consider action if the issue was “warmed up.” Then, “when he judges the atmosphere to be propitious,” he would, if he could, present it: “On this hope we rest.”
Lape, ER, Carrie Chapman Catt, and countless others warmed the issue up, as FDR suggested. They wrote articles, gave speeches, lobbied senators. Hearst was furious, and Lape considered it a great victory when he editorialized against their “propaganda.”
Congenial hearings were held in March 1934 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Lape was pleased to have Catt and the women of the organized peace committees behind her. She wrote ER: “Everybody understands Franklin’s feeling—that he cannot place his personal prestige with the Senate behind everything, and that the whole legislative picture must be taken into account.” But the women were convinced: “If the Court comes up it will pass. Trouble is to get it up….”
Lape asked ER to attend the 1934 hearings, but she could not: “I am terribly sorry, but Franklin thinks that I had better not go to any hearings. I never go to either the code hearings or to any of the others at the Capitol….” She invited Esther and Elizabeth to stay at the White House. But Lape telegrammed her regrets: It “might on this particular occasion be embarrassing to you and even be interpreted as committing someone else to more aggressive line on court action than he wants to show at moment.” Moreover, Hearst ran “cartoons three times during past week,” and she was named among the “arch propagandists.” Lape stayed at the Mayflower with Narcissa Vanderlip and Curtis Bok.
After the hearings, ER sent Lape the sad news that although they were a great success FDR’s advisers were “all convinced” the World Court should not be brought up until after the 1934 congressional elections, since “it would just give Mr. Hearst another thing to pin his attack on. So I am afraid there is not much chance.”
On 24 March, Senator Hiram Johnson confirmed ER’s fears: If the Court was introduced, he warned, nothing else would get done. Johnson, who had voted against the Versailles Treaty, now announced that the World Court represented “the destruction of American sovereignty” and won an agreement to shelve the issue until Congress reconvened in January 1935.
The November 1934 elections had given the Democrats five more than the needed two-thirds majority, and a sufficient number of Republicans favored the Court to reassure ER’s circle. The First Lady entered the January 1935 debates with essays and speeches that earned her a reputation as one of America’s most vigorous peace advocates.
On 7 January, she wrote Hick about her “satisfactory day.” There were morning meetings, lunch with Tommy, a drive with Louis. And from three to five, she locked her door and with Tommy wrote three radio speeches and one article. Nan arrived at five for tea; at six ER swam with FDR, then read for half an hour: Pearl Buck’s latest novel, A House Divided, the final volume of her trilogy preceded by The Good Earth and The Sons, “and it is fascinating.”
During that routinely hectic day, ER wrote one of her most provocative and enduring speeches for Carrie Chapman Catt’s seventy-sixth birthday. Presented on 9 January 1935 at the tenth anniversary conference of the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War and published in the book Why Wars Must Cease, ER’s essay was in part a stirring rally for the World Court.
“Because the War Idea Is Obsolete” began with a headnote by George Washington: “My first wish is to see this plague of mankind [war] banished from the earth.”
ER set out “to prove” that although we have not “as yet recognized it,” in fact “the war idea is obsole
te.” There were many traditions which humans clung to until they simply gave them up, because they were obsolete—and eventually it was commonly recognized that they were obsolete. Killing witches, for example, was once the rage throughout Europe and America. When “people revert” to the killing and torture of old women somebody calls a witch, “we now say they are crazy.”
But among nations “the war idea … hangs on … with outmoded and long-drawn-out cruelty.” However, ER wrote, war “no longer worked,” it no longer achieved its stated goals: During the American Revolution, “we desired separation from England and we achieved it.” During the Civil War, fighting had “two objectives.” Though “wasteful and costly” the Civil War “freed the slaves” and preserved a “unified nation.” Therefore, the war idea was not yet obsolete.
But the “world conflagration” of 1914–18 “proved for the first time in our history that the war idea is obsolete…. It did not achieve its objectives.” The United States fought, we were told, “to preserve democracy, to prevent the people of Europe from coming under the control of a despotic government which had no regard for treaties or the rights of neutral nations, and, above all, to end all future wars.”
In terms of those objectives, “these four years were absolutely wasted.” Then, at Versailles, the horror was compounded: Instead of “preventing future wars, the settlements arrived at have simply fostered hostilities. There is more talk of war today, not to mention wars actually going on in the Far East and in South America, than has been the case in many long years. The world over, countries are armed camps.”
Civilization itself was threatened by modern warfare. There was no moral gain, and it was not good for the soul.
Private profit is made out of the dead bodies of men. The more we see of the munitions business, of the use of chemicals, of the traffic in [armaments], the more we realize that human cupidity is as universal as human heroism…. If we are to do away with the war idea, one of the first steps will be to do away with all possibility of private profit.
She defined war as quite simply a lose-lose situation: All families suffer the same when their sons are killed in battle. Moreover, “economic waste in one part of the world will have an economic effect in other parts of the world. We profited for a time commercially, but as the rest of the world suffers, so eventually do we.”
ER rejected the widespread conviction that wars were inevitable; that human nature was warlike and thrilled especially to banners and cannons, trumpets and muskets. “That seems to me like saying that human nature is so made that we must destroy ourselves. After all, human nature has some intelligence,” and is demonstrably capable of “good will,” at least on an individual basis. Wars would end, therefore, when enough people worked to persuade “their government [to] find the way to stop war.”
ER’s speech was the clearest statement of her international views to date. She was proud to have it included in Catt’s book with essays by women she so admired—including Alice Hamilton, Jane Addams, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mary Woolley, and Judge Florence Allen. Why Wars Must Cease represented an urgent appeal to prevent the next war, which seemed so imminent, and so preventable.
Although Time, generally in favor of internationalist solutions, considered the World Court “the deadest political issue in the land,” the Senate debate was filled with fearful hyperbole. Isolationist “Bitter-Enders, the ragged remnant of 1919,” including Hiram Johnson and William Edgar Borah, joined by Louisiana’s Huey Long, did their rhetorical best to inflame fears about U.S. involvement in Europe’s hideous disasters should the United States join the Court.
Huey Long, with dramatic frenzy, shouted that this meant the end of American sovereignty, the end of everything: “We are being rushed … into this World Court so that Señor Ab Jap or some other something … can pass upon our controversies.”
Throughout the two-week debate, Hearst papers conducted an avalanche of opposition. From his retreat at San Simeon, Hearst “tossed his long, horsey head and charged.” His editorialists “throughout the land shrilled and thundered with the threat of war. No attack on the Court was too preposterous to be splashed across the front pages of Hearstpapers.” Moreover, his personal army of lobbyists descended on the Senate, met privately, made endless calls and unnamed deals.
Minnesota’s Senator Thomas D. Schall not only attacked “37,000 foreign agents in the U.S. now working for passage of the so-called World Court,” he roared: “To hell with Europe and the rest of those nations.” He also attacked ER personally, until majority leader Robinson interrupted him: “I am not going to yield [to allow Minnesota’s senator] to make one of his characteristic attacks on Mrs. Roosevelt.”
Father Charles Coughlin, Detroit’s radio priest, who broadcast nationally, led an incipient fascist movement that was crudely anti-Semitic, and his assault against the World Court included his charges that it would be dominated by Jewish money changers: America’s “national sovereignty” was about to be sacrificed on the altar of the international bankers, that well-known crowd dominated by Rothschilds, Warburgs, Kuhns, and Loebs. Vote no. Vote against the World Court. “Today, tomorrow may be too late … whether you can afford it or not, send your Senators telegrams … vote NO! …”
ER broadcast to counter Father Coughlin’s radio appeals against the godless, wicked World Court. She called for telegrams to illustrate the real “spirit of our country,” which was unafraid “to join the World Court … I beg of you to let your [senators] know at once….”
When the debate ended, on Friday afternoon, 25 January, prospects still looked favorable. But Senator Robinson agreed to a weekend recess. During that time, Hearst papers and Coughlin’s broadcasts unleashed a propaganda carnival: It was the duty of every loyal American to save the country. Wire your senator. Keep America safe from foreign entanglements, foreign wars, foreign plunder.
Over forty thousand telegrams rolled into the Senate Monday morning. Individuals, churches, Sunday schools in little towns all over America sent wires. Western Union hired thirty-five extra clerks; the telegrams were delivered by wheelbarrow. It was unprecedented. When the vote was taken on Tuesday, 29 January, the Court lost by seven votes. Of ninety-six senators, fifty-two voted for, thirty-six against, the rest absented themselves.
After the tally, “jubilant Hearstlings tumbled over each other in their rush to telephone San Simeon. No less than 15 Senators telephoned congratulations to Detroit.”
Privately, FDR thanked Senator Joe Robinson, and noted: “As to the 36 Senators who [opposed] I am inclined to think that if they ever get to Heaven they will be doing a great deal of apologizing for a very long time—that is if God is against war—and I think He is.”
Publicly, however, FDR did little to block the drift away from the Court. He did not go on the radio, and he failed to throw any of the mighty weight of his office into the fray. Time wondered if the president had “really been heart & soul behind the Court? The wisest answer seemed to be: No.”
When reporters trooped into his office the next day, FDR was dressed for his birthday “in a new grey homespun suit, a white rose and his best smile.” When asked about the World Court vote he said only: “I am sending a note to Senator Robinson thanking him for a very able and very honorable fight.”
ER, who had broadcast, trumpeted the Court at her press conference, and spoken at every available forum, including a great convention of Chautauquas that met at the White House, was devastated but did not criticize her husband.
Lape, who sat in the gallery throughout the World Court debate, was bitter about FDR’s failure to prepare Senate leaders: “The votes were there … but there was nobody on the floor to deal with perfectly simple questions, nobody really handled it. Robinson was the leader, but inadequate and F should have realized that….” It had been “a dreadful, dreadful experience,” and she blamed FDR: “If the President wants something, the men know it.” But even decades later, Lape was reluctant to criticize him: “The Court needed the. Pr
esident’s leadership, but I don’t think there is any point making that point.”
Immediately after the vote, Lape canceled her expected visit to the White House—”I wasn’t fit for anyone’s dinner table”—and left Washington.
In her editorial for the Women’s Democratic News, ER called the World Court defeat a “serious set back in our efforts to deal peacefully with the rest of the world…. We need a court of law to build up a body of international law.” Now all the years of effort by genuine statesmen had been “brought to naught by a chain of newspapers and a limited number of broadcasts.”
Unreconciled to the defeat, ER nevertheless defended her husband. She replied to a disappointed letter critical of her husband’s public silence by a member of the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War:
I doubt if any public word by the President would have helped matters much. He sent for every Democrat and Independent Senator and talked to him personally, besides sending his message. I am afraid that the pressure must come from the people themselves and, until it does, we will never become a member of the World Court.
Actually, FDR had not rallied senatorial support, and on 30 January, ER confided her deeper feelings to Hick: “I rather expected the vote to go as it did. We are so prone to be led by the Hearsts and the Coughlins and the Longs and I am only really sorry that I pushed FDR to try to pass it.” ER hoped especially that her efforts did not “imperil any of our other things!”
ER characteristically blamed herself, and was forever dismayed by the loss of what she considered the last hope for collective security in the struggle for democracy and peace. America’s rejection of the World Court was for her a personal defeat, as well as a political tragedy which carried a cruel and bitter message to the future.
Unknown to ER, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, also considered it a major diplomatic disaster: If the Court had passed, “our Government’s prestige in Europe would have been raised by about 50 percent.” Like ER, Dodd rejected the international debt question as a fraudulent argument. Shortly after the Court vote he met with members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and explained why it was a chimera from a historical point of view: The United States had, from 1820 to 1850, repudiated over “200 million [dollars] of valid obligations and had failed to pay interest on nearly all obligations for a period often years.”
Eleanor Roosevelt Page 35