Eleanor Roosevelt
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Dodd did not understand why the senators were not better informed, and was convinced that if they had had such facts before them prior to the vote “we should have had a different result.”
Other members of FDR’s team did not agree. Harold Ickes was among those who censured ER’s involvement. Ickes considered the vote a “decisive defeat” for the administration and blamed ER personally:
[Senators] were bitter in their criticism of Mrs. Roosevelt…. It does seem to me that she is not doing the President any good. She is becoming altogether too active in public affairs and I think that she is harmful rather than helpful. After all, the people did not elect her President….
A shocking aftermath of the World Court defeat was an administrative assault against Esther Lape’s American Foundation: Federal tax authorities “served notice” that if the American Foundation continued its campaign for the World Court, it would lose its tax-exempt status. Lape blamed neither Morgenthau nor FDR, but that order silenced the American Foundation on international issues. World Court membership did not come up again until after World War II.
Lape never discussed the political decision to threaten the American Foundation’s tax exemption. But tax investigations and similar fiscal harassments were a bit of political hardball FDR had used against such dangerous enemies as Huey Long.
Defeated, and punished, Lape transferred the American Foundation’s “campaign of public education” to other issues of urgency, notably “public health, and medical care.” Lape and her allies prepared a national health care proposal for the upcoming social security debates.
Whatever bitter feelings ER may have felt after the Court defeat, she and Louis Howe managed to be amusing and “worked up some things” for FDR’s birthday dinner on 30 January. Then she joined Anna, Ruth, Elliott, Tommy, and Missy at the birthday balls, for “as short a time as I can manage!” But for weeks after what she realized was the final defeat for the World Court, she performed her obligations and chores within the grip of an unusually severe emotional depression. Until the spring, almost all her letters were despondent.
Her sense of personal loss and anguish was heightened by FDR’s continued refusal to address the ongoing lynching issue. Walter White was distressed that it went unmentioned in his State of the Union speech—despite the autumn lynching of Claude Neal, advertised in fifteen newspapers and broadcasts over the radio. Men, women, and children were invited to one of the most savage lynchings in U.S. history on 26 October 1934.
Over one hundred men stormed a county jail at Brewston, Alabama, to seize Claude Neal, accused of the murder of a white woman in Marianna, Florida, where he was transported and tortured to death before a frenzied crowd of cheering participants. After an orgy of unspeakable violence and mutilation, the charred, disfigured remains of a man hung from a tree in the courthouse square, and photographs were sold for fifty cents each.
When FDR was asked by reporters if he would now support the Costigan-Wagner bill, he asked for time so that he might “check up and see what I did last year. I have forgotten.”
Walter White sent ER the NAACP report that described the Marianna lynching and asked her if the Justice Department could not prosecute on the basis of the new Lindbergh law, since Neal had been taken across state lines. Attorney General Homer Cummings denied the law’s relevance, since no ransom was involved. ER wrote White: “The Marianna lynching was a horrible thing. I wish very much that the Department of Justice might come to a different point of view and I think possibly they will.”
Regretting that many people had “become more cynical regarding the attitude of the administration,” White asked ER to appear at a protest meeting at Carnegie Hall. ER dropped a memo into her husband’s bedside basket: “FDR I would like to do it, of course talking over the speech, but will do whatever you say.” He said, through a memo sent by Missy: “This is dynamite.” ER wrote White: “I do not feel it wise to speak … but I will talk to the President and see what can be done in some other way….”
White encouraged his constituents to remain patient, “saying that perhaps the President will send a special message to Congress. He wrote ER: “I wonder if you could advise me if my optimism is well founded. It would help during this very trying period to know that our efforts have not been in vain….”
ER replied:
I talked to the President … this morning. He wants me to say that he was talking to the leaders on the lynching question and his sentence on crime in his address to Congress touched on that because lynching is a crime. However he, himself, will write you more fully a little later on.
While FDR’s Southern strategy kept him aloof, ER worked ever more closely with the NAACP. She welcomed James Weldon Johnson’s invitation to attend a 12 February dinner to honor Arthur Spingarn’s twenty-one years as chair of the National Legal Committee of the NAACP and looked forward to visiting a controversial art exhibit at a major New York gallery—the NAACP’s “Art Commentary on Lynching.” It featured works by Reginald Marsh, George Bellows, Thomas Benton, Julius Bloch, José Clemente Orozco, Harry Sternberg, Noguchi, William Gropper, and many others. Pearl S. Buck opened the exhibition, and there was vivid commentary written by Sherwood Anderson and Erskine Caldwell. The paintings and drawings were stark and blunt, including Reginald Marsh’s award-winning New Yorker illustration of a mother holding her child on her shoulders to get a better view, captioned “This is her first lynching.”
The New York Times called it a “macabre exhibition.” The New York World Telegram’s art critic wrote: “It is an exhibition which tears the heart and chills the blood … this is not an exhibition for softies. It may upset your stomach. If it upsets your complacency … it will have been successful.”
ER wanted FDR to support the Costigan-Wagner bill and did not intend to upset him with a political gesture he might deplore. She wrote Walter White:
The more I think about going to the exhibition, the more troubled I am, so this morning I went in to talk to my husband…. [He] said it was quite all right for me to go, but if some reporter … [described] some horrible picture, it would cause more Southern opposition. They plan to bring the bill out quietly as soon as possible although two Southern Senators have said they would filibuster…. He thinks, however, they can get it through.
ER decided, therefore, that it would “be safer if I came without any publicity or did not come at all.”
In the midst of negotiations regarding the lynching exhibit, an unfortunate incident confused ER’s NAACP friends, and embarrassed the First Lady. Ellen Woodward received a picture of “three namesakes of the President,” sent by Virginia’s director of women’s work, Ella Agnew. She thought the photograph “from the field” attractive and asked Woodward “to be sure that either Mr. or Mrs. Roosevelt sees it.” Woodward wrote ER: “We know that you receive many foolish things but the pickaninnies are right cute! Also we note that it took three children to bear the one name, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
ER replied: “Thank you so much for sending me the pictures of the little pickaninnies. They certainly are cunning and the President was very much amused.”
On Sunday, 13 January, the Richmond Times-Dispatch ran a story about the “New Deal Triplets,” thirteen-month-old Franklin, Delano, and Roosevelt Jones—Prince Edward County relief clients: “John and Mary Jones came on the relief rolls only a few weeks before the babies were born.” To demonstrate their appreciation, “they decided to name their offsprings after their benefactor….”
ER’s letter was published as part of the story. Woodward had sent it on to Agnew, who said it was taken from her personal files. Many apologies went around, as did angry letters, including one from a Negro club:
We wish to call your attention to the fact that the above term is highly resented by the Negro people. Feeling that your interest in this group would not willingly lead you to offer any offense, we respectfully bring this matter to your attention, confident in the belief that you will do whatever is necessary t
o correct the impression which its use has created.
ER replied: “I have your letter and assure you that no lack of respect was meant…. We always considered ‘pickaninny’ as a term of endearment and often use it for any child.” Although she was in the vanguard of considerable change regarding race relations, for ER language changed last of all.
Throughout February and March, White trusted in FDR’s good intentions, based on ER’s encouragement. But the waiting game was hopeless, and embarrassing for White. His own reputation was jeopardized by FDR’s continued silence. In February, former Missouri congressman Leonidas Dyer, who had introduced the famous Dyer antilynching bill of 1922, chided White for his faith in the Roosevelts. White had been “deceived.”
You and the CRISIS ought to tell the colored people the truth, which is that there is no chance whatever for this legislation [in a] Democratic Congress. … If the CRISIS is to continue in this deception I hope you will discontinue sending it to me.
Again White turned to ER: If he could only talk with the president; would she make one more appointment; they had the votes all lined up. ER tried, but McIntyre replied that FDR was too busy, and wrote a memo to Tommy: “Confidentially, this is a very delicate situation and it does not seem advisable to draw the President into it any more than we have to.”
ER had penciled on White’s letter to FDR: “I do think you could see him HERE and help him on tactics with advice. This ought to go through.”
Two weeks later, Costigan brought his bill up—and the Southland arose. Prepared to filibuster for months, the almost solid South would block everything on the Senate calendar, including the social security bill passed by the House. FDR was asked to call off the filibuster by an expression of righteous indignation. He refused to utter one public word of protest. Costigan caved in, and on 1 May withdrew the antilynch bill. The New York Times opined that the surrender looked like “Appomatox in reverse.”
White thanked ER for her “deep personal interest” and resigned in protest from the Virgin Islands Advisory Council—which she had recommended him for. To FDR he wrote: “It is my belief that the utterly shameless filibuster could not have withstood the pressure of public opinion had you spoken out against it. In justice to the cause I serve I cannot continue to remain even a small part of your official family.”
Fascist brutality and racialist rhetoric in Europe encouraged American lynchers. America’s failure to demonstrate official opposition encouraged racialist violence in Europe. The message seemed to be: Lynching was done; torture was acceptable. ER committed herself to a long struggle. She wrote White: “I am so sorry about the bill. Of course all of us are going on fighting….”
She sent FDR a scathing editorial White had sent her which condemned the president’s silence, with a note: “Pretty bitter isn’t it? I can’t blame them though….”*
FDR’s silence and ER’s interventions on behalf of the Costigan-Wagner bill revealed a deep level of political tension within the White House. Familial disagreements increasingly involved profound principles and ethical concerns. FDR insisted that practical politics, issues of strategy and tactics, were involved, and he expected ER to accept his wisdom on these matters. ER did not agree, and on this issue continued to write, network, and organize support. But she spoke publicly only when and where FDR approved.
In May, Roy Wilkins invited ER to attend the closing session of the NAACP’s twenty-sixth annual convention in St. Louis. This would be, Wilkins wrote, a “particularly significant Conference,” which would address “the greatest crisis ever faced by the twelve million colored American citizens.” There was, moreover, “great restlessness, doubt, and even some hostility among the colored people” toward the administration.
Wilkins cited the discriminatory practices of NRA, PWA, AAA, and FERA especially. Atop all the disappointments of 1933–34 was the recent failure of the antilynching bill even to get a hearing. Now, as the presidential campaign season approached, even the proposed work relief program, which was to become the Works Progress Administration (WPA), was met with “greater and greater cynicism.” He believed “it would be good strategy from the Administration’s standpoint, and good Americanism from the standpoint of the welfare of all our people, for some emissary to give a sincere word of reassurance…. We hope that you will consent to be that ambassador.”
ER asked: “FDR should I go? or could you send someone really good & interested.” Missy wrote Tommy to suggest that Oscar Chapman represent the First Lady, who should not go. ER acquiesced, but sent a public message of “deep regret that I was obliged to refuse to attend the conference.”
The winter-spring congressional season of 1935 filled ER with despair. In addition to the collapse of the World Court and the Costigan-Wagner bill there were brutal negotiations over the social security bill. For months her letters were punctuated by unusual exhaustion, frustration, genuine confusion.
For over twenty years, Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and others had publicly fought for mothers’ pensions, widows’ benefits, old-age security, workers’ compensation, and unemployment insurance. From 1924 on ER championed universal protection, decent housing, and public health care for all Americans. The fight for economic security was not new, and it was wrong to credit Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth Clubs and California’s Dr. Francis E. Townsend with radicalizing FDR and driving the second New Deal into old-age pensions and steps toward real security.* ER and her circle had been agitating for these issues for decades.
FDR had introduced them to New York State when he was governor, and now they were about to become national policy. But something happened to social security between FDR’s thrilling January speech, which so gratified ER, and the springtime compromises that devoured the universal aspect of his promise.
ER’s papers contain an important file on social security, with FDR’s heavily marked marginalia in an effort to explain changes in administrative policy. FDR instructed his wife to see especially pages 9 and 10 of “Statement of the Secretary of the Treasury on the Economic Security Bill.” There one reads Henry Morgenthau’s testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee opposing the president’s stated intention that the federal government defray half the cost of old-age insurance and provide universal coverage:
The national contributory old-age annuity system, as now proposed, includes every employee in the United States, other than those of governmental agencies or railways…. This means that every transient or casual laborer is included, that every domestic servant is covered, and that the large and shifting class of agricultural workers is covered.
Morgenthau proposed instead that they be excluded: “Under the income tax law, the Bureau of Internal Revenue last year handled something less than five million returns;* with the present nearly universal coverage of the Bill’s provisions,” he estimated 20 million people would be involved. That would require “minutely detailed, and very expensive enforcement efforts.” Therefore, to avoid “the imposition of administrative burdens … that would threaten … the entire system,” Morgenthau helped doom the promise of social security for all Americans.
Morgenthau’s testimony astonished liberals. On 5 February 1935, he called for the exclusion of America’s neediest and most insecure workers in what was to have been a universal system to abolish need and insecurity. The race factor was publicly ignored, but clearly FDR and his treasury secretary caved in to Southern opposition. Since the vast majority of Negro workers were in precisely the categories excluded, Morgenthau’s proposal was part of FDR’s Southern strategy and guaranteed a “Lily White Social Security System,” which the NAACP immediately editorialized against.
Frances Perkins wrote that of the entire Committee on Economic Security, which she chaired, only Morgenthau “indicated his flat opposition” to the government “contribution out of general revenues” for old-age insurance. Instead he proposed a 1 percent tax by employers and employees, with no federal contribution at all. This created the regressive payroll tax for ol
d-age security, which many considered reactionary. No security system in Europe, where social insurance was widespread,* was based on such a collection system, without governmental contribution.
According to Perkins, every member of her Committee on Economic Security was “startled” by Morgenthau’s betrayal, since universal coverage “had been agreed upon” from the beginning. But: “There was nothing for me to do but accept, temporarily at least….”
A truly liberal bill, introduced by Ernest Lundeen, Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party representative, called for universal coverage and unemployment benefits for every unemployed worker to be paid for by federal funds and corporate taxes. But the administration bill, with Morgenthau’s limitations, was happily accepted by the conservative and Southern-dominated House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Robert Doughton of North Carolina, and the Senate’s Finance Committee, chaired by Mississippi Senator Pat Harrison.
Everything ER had ever said on behalf of old-age security, work, and equity contradicted Morgenthau’s proposals. What had happened to FDR’s universal “cradle to the grave” security package? There is no paper trail to indicate the route to Morgenthau’s decision. There is no evidence to indicate the discussions that must have dominated White House conversations. From her correspondence we know that ER was bewildered. Did her husband now really intend to curtail social security for the vast majority of working women and black men for reasons of administrative simplicity and ease?