From the beginning, 11th Street was for ER a working space, and the front guestroom doubled as Tommy’s office and bedroom. Esther and Elizabeth lived below ER on the first two floors. As at Val-Kill, ER enjoyed especially the screened sunporch outside her bedroom window and above Esther’s garden, where she slept until the first frost.
After her birthday, ER returned to Washington and “a dreadful story” about John Boettiger’s momentary decision to work for the TVA. The article also “dragged” ER in, and she was enraged by the relentless price paid by an entire family when a parent agreed “to serve his country! … I’m beginning to think obscurity the greatest boon we can ask for in this world!”
Her brother Hall was with ER at the White House, where she was “back at the old routine.” The house was “upside down,” and there was an interesting discussion about the invective and criticism recently heaped upon the children. ER wrote: “I am a bit sorry for James and John, even for F Jr. It is funny you can’t be as indifferent when your children or your friends are concerned as you are about yourself!” She wrote: “Gee! If FDR could get out this year!”
From West Virginia, Hick sent ER “the pages for your engagement book for January and February” and presents for her apartment, including an iron ashtray, and wicker basketry which ER collected in great quantity. Hick’s report from this return trip to West Virginia was as vivid as her earlier ones, and she remained amazed by the daunting poverty amid the state’s natural beauty:
One scene, about fifty miles from Charleston, I’ll never forget—out across a valley, with a wide, foamy river down below. The colors on the mountains are beyond description…. Even the mean little houses are lost in this splendour!
And here in this place of breathtaking loveliness, people were so poor, an appalling and heartbreaking apathy triumphed:
Today I drove by a house that was burning down. A little grey, unpainted cabin in a little grey unpainted town. And silently watching the flames as they shot up through the roof, a little group of people. They weren’t trying to save the house…. And in that silent apathetic group must have been the people who had lived in that house that was burning down! Driving on through the town, I observed that hardly anyone appeared to be interested in the fire, although the flames and smoke were plainly visible from the main street.
During her second day in the rural south, Hick saw WPA projects which cheered her and wrote ER the reason she felt so good was that she revisited an “awful tent colony” that had two years before gotten FDR “all worked up.”
[Now] those tents are gone, darling! Every last horrible one of them! And only 15 of the 63 families remain there—living, not in tents, but in wooden houses they built for themselves, with the aid of the relief people. Gardens around them. Even flowers…. And all but 15 of those blacklisted coal miners are back at work—and in the mine that blacklisted them! Isn’t that simply swell?
Hick credited Mrs. Kimberling, the social worker, who with amazing concern and activity had rehabilitated the entire community. In 1933, rebellion and homicide were in the air. Now the area was transformed. Hick was ecstatic: What Mrs. Kimberling had achieved with “the mine bosses is almost beyond belief. Gosh, what a great job….”
Major Turner, West Virginia’s state director of public welfare, particularly moved her. He removed children from a local reform school. The children, eleven and younger, were paroled to him personally. He placed them in a camp he established for three months, where he “‘de-louses them, physically and morally’—cleans them up, builds them up, and tries to give them a better outlook and break them of the bad habits they’ve acquired in reform school. Finally he places them in carefully selected homes,” which he monitored for abuses and irregularities.
Hick identified with those children: “When I was a kid there was no one to give me that much protection. But even what I went through was better than a reform school.” Hick believed that she would never have had a chance, had she “landed in one of those places….”
ER asked Hick to revisit Red House, a West Virginia resettlement community she cared about almost as much as Arthurdale. The First Lady was troubled by reports of widespread dissatisfaction. Hick confirmed ER’s suspicions:
First of all, you’d hardly recognize Red House now…. The houses are finished. The homesteaders are living in them. There are curtains at the windows. Gardens were raised this summer. The brilliant colors of autumn flowers are most effective against the greyish walls of the houses.
The place was attractive, but community morale was low:
The air is full of rumors…. They are unhappy because they have no work except that given them around the homestead. They don’t want that. They want jobs…. They are beginning to quarrel among themselves. The women’s club … has pretty much gone to pot…. There [was upset about] the houses. The lack of closet space, for instance—as you predicted!
The walls cracked as the houses settled. “You can see daylight around some of the pipes, up under the roofs, around the windows….” While fixable, and basically comfortable, they were cheaply made, and it showed. Still, for those women who had to carry water every day two miles up into the mountains, running water meant a lot.
Without ER’s supervision and regular oversight, many more corners were cut at Red House than at Arthurdale, and indignities occurred. Hick was furious:
One thing that burns me up so is that they don’t ever think of these people as individuals, but as units in a project. I don’t think you can deal with these people that way…. They need a Miss Clapp at Red House. Or a Mrs. Kimberling. She didn’t think of those 63 miners as units…. There are 120 families at Red House. And I think the heads of those families should be treated as 120 individuals, not units…. (I’ll bet Rex and Grace [Tugwell] wouldn’t agree with me!)
The women of the community wanted a library and a nursery school. Everybody wanted to pitch in, but everybody was discouraged. And Hick doubted that the bureaucrats in Washington would really understand. Hick was reminded of “the idea you had last spring, for someone to come and live for a few weeks in every one of these homesteads to watch the morale and mental adjustment” of the people of Arthurdale, Red House, Crossville, Tennessee. People wanted respect and control over their own lives and communities. But no study of their needs, skills, and interests was made.
ER was grateful for Hick’s description of Red House: “You confirmed just the things I’ve been feeling. These people can’t make a go alone until they get on their feet and work is the most important factor in real rehabilitation.”
ER knew “things were bad for some time. If only human beings could be different!” She sent Bernard Baruch to Red House. “And I imagine that he will have much to tell [the Tugwells]…”
Subsequently, Baruch met with FDR who was “eager for progress”; and Red House was “thoroughly investigated.” ER wrote Hick, “If something doesn’t get done I’ll eat my hat.”
ER used Hick’s reports in a variety of ways, and assured her they were important: “F may say I don’t know but he can’t say that of you.”
In November, ER and Hick spent ten days together, and ER faced the holiday season in a cheerful mood. Part of the reason was that she was pleased by her husband’s recent speeches. It was noteworthy, really, the extent to which ER’s moods lifted when FDR’s words reflected her views.
ER cherished the holidays, and all year long selected gifts for her family, household staffs, their families, and the widest variety of political and personal friends. Annually she arranged individual evenings for Hick, Louis Howe, Earl Miller, Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman.
On 2 December, ER wrote Hick from Val-Kill, where she was spending a vacation week with Earl Miller, Marion Dickerman, Nancy Cook, and her brother. Hall’s increasingly distressful alcoholic condition eroded ER’s long-held hope that he would someday get himself under control: “Hall blew in this morning and we had a hectic talk as he was trying to telephone
every one in the world.”
On that cold December night, ER longed for Hick’s warmth: “Darling. I had a good night’s sleep on the porch but I missed you and used my sleeping bag and a hot water bottle!”
On 12 December 1935, ER celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Urban League with a call for racial justice. Her address was nationally broadcast over NBC’s Blue Network at 10:45 P.M., and subsequently published:
We have a great responsibility here in the U.S. because we offer the best example that exists perhaps today throughout the world, of the fact that if different races know each other they may live peacefully together.
But peace would be possible only if discrimination ended, “inequalities,” and “many grave injustices” ceased.
She understood that “the Government in its new efforts and programs was not always fair to the Negro race.” But this “is not the intention of those at the top, and as far as possible I hope that we may work together to eliminate any real injustice.” She hoped for national unity to “stomp out” lynching and racial violence, so that we may be able to face the other nations of the world and to uphold our real ideals here and abroad, [as an] example to the world of “peace on earth [and] goodwill….”
While ER emphasized race as 1936 dawned, Hick emphasized the ongoing injustices women faced:
Oh. God damn this women’s work anyway! It seems that up here in Houghton [Michigan] they have a practice house, for training maids, a project dear to the heart of the state director of women’s work. The only trouble is … they apparently reached the saturation point of placing the trained maids they turned out…. So … they began shipping them to Detroit and Chicago.
Hick was particularly outraged that they were paid only $10 a month:
Why, damn it, the houses of prostitution in Chicago are full of country girls who went to the big city for less than a living wage. It’s been that way since the beginning of time. Now should I tell that damned fool of a woman down in housing, when I see her in Detroit next week, a few of the facts of life? or shouldn’t I?….
ER shared Hick’s outrage “about the maids—I hope you went in and told the lady!”
On 19 December ER was disquieted by Mary Harriman Rumsey’s memorial service, held on the first anniversary of her death. ER hated funerals and deplored memorial services:
Darling, don’t let anyone hold memorial meetings for me after I leave you. It is cruel to those who really love you and miss you and means nothing to the others except an obligation fulfilled and certainly it can mean nothing to the spirit in another sphere if it is there at all! I’d like to be remembered happily if that is possible, if that can’t be I’d rather be forgotten.
On 20 December 1935, ER formally signed her contract with United Features for her new daily syndicated column, “My Day.” ER’s column would give her a regular forum to express her most heartfelt concerns. It was a fitting end to 1935, a year of defeats and progress. The Social Security Act, however flawed, had changed the nation’s views about governmental responsibility, and housing and race were on the national agenda as never before. ER’s public statements had everywhere created a stir. Although all their political enemies were lined up and strident, the campaign was enhanced by a new civil rights movement everywhere unfolding. There is no way to measure the impact of ER’s public words and activities on other people, the courage her acts of simple courtesy may have imparted. On the air, and in speeches around the country, the First Lady set a pace, took a step, indicated what was imaginable, possible, done.
One of the South’s most significant activists for race justice noticed. Lillian Smith, from her home atop Old Screamer Mountain in the northern Georgia foothills of the Blue Ridge, wrote her first words against racism and began to publish a magazine that became The North Georgia Review, and then The South Today. She called 1935 “a mean bad year,” but considered Eleanor Roosevelt “a symbol of the future” where people might all “live as integrated personalities, free to grow, to believe as they wish, to say aloud what they believe, free not to bow to any great power or authority whether of state or church or economic power.”
But there was one subject ER avoided. Even in her letter to Elinor Morgenthau she failed to refer specifically to the pitiless facts that confronted Hitler’s victims, and worsened daily.
On 14 September 1935, German Jews were stripped of citizenship, and denied all political or civil rights. In two Nuremberg laws, the “Law for the Protection of German Blood” and the “Reich Citizenship Law,” Hitler’s anti-Jewish crusade was legalized. The law had nothing to do with religion, only ancestry. There were full Jews and mongrels (Mischlinges), or part Jews. Fundamentally, a Jew was anyone with one Jewish grandparent, including Roman Catholic converts, priests and nuns.
On 27 December, at the last cabinet meeting of 1935, FDR told of a recent letter from Ambassador Dodd in Berlin: According to Ickes, FDR “said it was the most pessimistic letter he has ever read.” William Dodd “thinks that nothing can restrain Hitler. The President remarked that, of course, some allowance should be made for Dodd’s intense prejudice against Hitler, but there seems to be no question that the international situation is very grave indeed.”
Neither FDR nor any member of the State Department protested, or referred to the Nuremberg laws, although Dodd warned that they represented “complete subordination for the Jews” and foreshadowed their “complete separation” from the German community. Dodd had wanted the United States, Britain, and France to boycott the Nuremberg rally, the Nazi Party’s annual spectacle, but the State Department rejected his proposal. Among the diplomats, only Dodd refused to attend.
On this issue, ER remained silent for five years.
*On 7 December 1935, Sir Samuel Hoare and Pierre Laval ceded two-thirds of Ethiopia to Italy, including vast territories impossible to conquer. They left a corridor through Italian territory to the Red Sea for Haile Selassie. The cynical secret pact; signed in Paris, was immediately scooped by the press, and it created a sensation. Laval’s government fell, and Hoare was forced to resign (though he was later appointed home secretary, ambassador to Spain, and air secretary). Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s government survived.
16: A Silence Beyond Repair
ER’s silence concerning the increasing violence against Germany’s Jews, radicals, and dissenters has traditionally been ascribed to her lack of information. But ER had full and immediate knowledge. During the summer of 1933, Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Carrie Chapman Catt, and especially Alice Hamilton provided details about events in Nazi Germany. Even after ER arranged a meeting with Hamilton and FDR, and despite all the information that arrived on his desk from his own friends, most notably Felix Frankfurter, a policy of administrative and State Department silence prevailed.
While FDR encouraged ER to speak out on certain domestic issues and did not prevent her from addressing others, a firm policy of public silence was imposed on her concerning most international issues. On this issue her response, however, is unique—her silence extends even to her private correspondence.
On 16 December 1933, ER received a desperate and haunting letter from a German refugee residing in London. An affluent, educated Jewish woman, Maria Meyer Wachman typed her letter in English from her refuge in the Park Lane Hotel:
Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,
Will you please forgive a foreigner, who dares to write to you. I do it simply as one woman to another, and my reason for my writing must be my excuse at the same time. I have no other to offer you.
Having the fullest confidence in your kind understanding for the matter, I have so very much at heart, I herewith beg you to help us, us Jewish people from Germany. If you would tell the American women and men the crime that is done by not helping us, I do believe—in spite of all—they will hear and listen and—finally admit this fact, if you tell them and challenge their conscience.
Maria Meyer Wachman was one of Germany’s first refugees. She lived in London for almost a year, hoping t
hat the world would notice and protest Hitler’s atrocities.
But nothing has been done so far … Besides the psychological suffering, we are not allowed to take any job in a foreign country, that means that our children have nothing to expect than starvation. I say every child is a present from heaven and its first right is to expect [to live] in peace. There is no political wrong, no civil crime, simply born a Jew, the same race, the Christ was …
As a poor human being, I appeal to you as an American woman and mother, high placed in life, I appeal to the world-wide American sense of justice … Can you really stand by and watch this? Can you stand and see us more or less all gassed?
I should like to have your word, you will do something…
ER responded to this appeal with a terse note: “My dear Miss Wachman: Unfortunately, in my present position I am obliged to leave all contacts with foreign governments in the hands of my husband and his advisers.”
There is no comparably curt reply on any domestic subject in her entire correspondence. Since silence is the ultimate collusion, how can it be explained? There are of course many possibilities.
FDR insisted that diplomatic affairs be left to specialists, and ER’s letters relating to international relations, even personal letters sent abroad, were drafted or approved by Sumner Welles or another member of the State Department. One can only imagine the conversations between ER and FDR that resulted in such full compliance with State Department policy.
Eleanor Roosevelt Page 44