Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  ER and Golden also disagreed about WPA theater productions. He feared that Hallie Flanagan’s productions did “not conform to professional standards” and might actually “harm” the theater. Although his opposition differed from the usual anticommunist bias that assailed WPA theater, ER vehemently disagreed. She considered WPA theater progressive and imaginative, the cutting edge of American culture. Because it dramatized labor issues, strikes, lynching, and other current events, an avalanche of opposition to its allegedly un-American procommunist sympathies resulted. The more controversial the Federal Theatre became, the more ER supported it. She called it excellent, and celebrated especially the theater’s democratic outreach.

  New and appreciative audiences were created throughout the country for both the classics and modern theater. Everybody thrilled to Orson Welles’s African-American production of Macbeth, which went from Harlem to a four-thousand-mile tour. A WPA survey in New York revealed that only one high school student out of thirty had ever seen live theater; in many communities throughout America nobody had. Flanagan’s stock companies, road companies, tent and truck shows, puppets, pageants, operas, revues, and theater in churches, schools, and community centers changed all that. By 1937, fifteen million Americans had attended a Federal Theatre production.

  ER did a national broadcast to promote Flanagan’s free Caravan Theatre, which played in parks throughout the country in summer. In 1937 “a really thrilling sequence of… Shakespeare, Shaw and Sinclair Lewis,” beginning with a “beautifully staged and orchestrated” production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, brought a new level of culture to the long deprived.*

  Newspapers filled with protest against ER and her support for WPA theater. It staged dangerous, immoral propaganda. One New York Times correspondent in May 1937 protested that all art and theater projects were dominated by “zealous” communists, and concluded: “I loathe fascists, but I cannot see how [fascism] can be avoided…. It is the only antidote for communism.”

  ER, however, was committed to freedom, experimentation, and Flanagan. When New York State passed the Dunnigan bill, which would give the New York license commissioner authority to close any “immoral” play, she urged Governor Herbert Lehman to veto it:

  The surest way to remove really undesirable plays from the stage is for the public to refuse to see them. Censorship by law has always seemed to me too difficult and complicated where art of any kind is concerned.

  ER criticized only one play during the spring of 1937. In her monthly column for Democratic Digest, she wrote:

  I spent a few days in New York… going to the theatre. One of the plays was a very clever one called “The Women,” but I cannot say that I enjoyed it for not only were the women rather dreadful creatures but you felt that the men who tolerated them must have been even more dreadful. Sad to say, those who were supposed to be bright spots in the way of virtue were so dull that you could not be thrilled by them! The play was clever and [about to be made] into a movie so you will probably become very well acquainted with these “Women.”

  Unable to be amused by Luce’s comedy about a woman who has just learned that her husband has a mistress, ER wrote an even more fierce review in her My Day column. She considered the situation “a real tragedy” trivialized by women she would never want to know:

  “I do not know the author, but I am very happy indeed that I do not very often have to associate with the women she gave us on the stage, nor, for that matter, the men….

  “They must have been such dull, stupid, little men to have cared at all at any time for such dull and cruel ‘cats.’”

  ER also deplored “the mother and her advice,” as well as “the one woman who was supposed to be ‘good’ and was so stupid….”

  To compound her mean words, ER failed to name Clare Boothe Luce in both columns. She paid for her reviews almost immediately. Time’s previously benign coverage of the First Lady ended. She wrote Esther Lape:

  I didn’t see the article in Time to which you refer although I did see the one on my income tax evasion! You know the author of the play The Women is the wife of [Henry Luce] the owner and publisher of Time, so I am not surprised at anything he says about me. I was rather ruthless in what I said about the play.

  Perhaps ER’s overserious assault against Luce’s catty comedy involved her resentment over Bernard Baruch’s enthusiasm for his former lover’s work. Struck by ER’s words, Baruch encouraged her to see it again. She did, but Clare Booth Luce’s characters annoyed her exceedingly: “I felt just as soiled by ‘The Women’ which I saw again last night as I did in the first instance. It is a beastly play and I hate to acknowledge its cleverness!”

  Unlike ER, Hick rather enjoyed The Women: “Strange sort of play, isn’t it? Queer, bitter, at times smart-alecky. At times, of course, very funny. Remember the scene between the cook and the maid? Pretty nasty, on the whole, and I can’t say I really liked it much, although I found it very diverting….”

  The last days of May were so crowded with social obligations and official people that ER complained. Hick empathized:

  I should think you would get sick of people! I get sick of them for you! God, how I loathe all that stuff! Bill [Dana] was describing to Ellie yesterday my manners at the White House. He said: “Most of the time Hick looks like a royal Bengal tiger that has been mussed up a bit!” Don’t you love it? Well, cheer up, dear. It will be over pretty soon, and you can settle down at Hyde Park for the summer.

  But, ER replied, there were “still some bad days ahead!” Among ER’s bad days were 29 May, when she noted without comment that she “received the German Ambassador’s wife.” The next day, fifteen hundred steelworkers and their families were attacked in Chicago during a Memorial Day march and rally. While U.S. Steel had negotiated with the CIO, Republic and other “little steel” companies refused. They greeted strikers with tear gas and tanks in Ohio and elsewhere. But Chicago was a labor town with a labor Democrat for mayor, and the marchers were in a festive mood, with women at the head of the march. Then, without provocation or warning, 264 police officers attacked the crowd, first with tear gas. As they fled, police opened fire and 30 men, women, and children were shot; 60 were “sadistically beaten,” and 10 died. The bloody violence was captured by Paramount newsreel journalists and given to the La Follette Committee.

  That evening, ER drove Tommy, Harold Hooker and Roberta Jonay to Rock Creek Cemetery to contemplate Grief.

  *The bill came up again in 1938, but never passed. Hitler editorialized, on 28 January 1938, in the Nazi press that the United States treated black people less humanely than Germany treated Jews.

  *The United States “ranked first in value of exports to Germany in 1933, 1934, and 1938.” Between 1934 and 1938, sales of American motor fuel and lubricating oil tripled in quantity and constituted 22 to 32 percent of German imports of petroleum. The United States supplied Germany with 20 to 28 percent of its imported copper and copper alloys and 67 to 73 percent of its imported uranium, vanadium, and molybdenum. In 1937 and 1938, U. S. exports of iron and scrap steel rose to 50 percent of Germany’s imports. It was a curious neutrality.

  * “In 1946, Goering admitted that Guernica was Germany’s testing ground. But not until April 1997 did Germany actually acknowledge “its guilt in the destruction” of Guernica. The raid, conducted by the German Condor Legion, was formally acknowledged in a ceremony to commemorate the victims. Germany’s ambassador to Spain, Henning Wegener, read “a message of mourning and reconciliation.” The German parliament rejected a motion to discuss the raid and include a formal statement of regret when Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s coalition voted against debate.

  *ER’s earnings were significant that spring; the Ladies’ Home Journal paid $75,000 for the serial rights, and her radio contract was for $3,000 per broadcast for a series of fifteen. In 1930s dollars that represented a major American fortune.

  * Susan and God won the Theatre Club Award in 1938.

  * Playwrights especially welc
omed Flanagan’s vision. George Bernard Shaw donated all his plays for a token fee: “As long as you stick to your fifty-cent maximum admission… you can [stage] anything of mine you like.” Eugene O’Neill did the same, and Sinclair Lewis spurned a commercial production of It Can’t Happen Here to support the Federal Theatre. It opened to wild enthusiasm and controversy on 27 October 1936, in twenty-one theaters in seventeen states, and toured the country, appearing before millions of Americans for 260 weeks.

  24: This Is My Story

  On 13 May 1937, three stories shared New York Times front-page headlines: “HOUSEWIVES ENTITLED TO FIXED SALARIES, LIKE ANY WORKER, MRS. ROOSEVELT HOLDS.” “GEORGE VI AND ELIZABETH CROWNED IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.” “BILBAO SUBURBS BOMBED…. MORE THAN 100 MISSILES WERE DROPPED—MADRID SHELLED.…” Fascist general Emilio Mola told Basque officials that since the world’s attention would be on the coronation in London, it was a good day to “blast the capital to bits.” The indignation aroused by a violent attack on civilians would be “thus lessened.” Also, Franco’s forces beat back government troops in Toledo and shelled Madrid.

  Events in Spain and Japan’s escalated warfare against China caused ER to reconsider her own pacifism: “I have just read Dorothy Thompson’s ‘The Dilemma of a Pacifist,’ and I find that, by and large, she has reached the same conclusion I have.” It was “dangerous” to let “the rest of the world stew in its own juice.”

  For ER, pacifism now meant that “you use every means in your power to prevent a fight, and this includes giving all the assistance you possibly can, short of military assistance…. But if war comes to your own country, then even pacifists… must stand up and fight for their beliefs.”

  Since war had come to Spain, ER was eager to give democracy in Spain “all the assistance” possible. The new facts of Blitzkrieg, “lightning war,” from the sky by Nazi Heinkel 111s and Junker 52s clarified whatever confusion antifascists may have felt about the “neutrality” of FDR’s desired blockade.

  ER’s understanding about events in Spain came firsthand from Martha Gellhorn, whose observations during her three-month tour of the war-torn areas were regularly reported to the First Lady. Now, Gellhorn was confused by the U.S. refusal to aid Bilbao refugees: “It seems that 500 kids… are waiting in Saint Jean de Luz to come to America. There is passage money for 100 of them, and countless offers of adoption.” But every snag was set out to stop them. Gellhorn was outraged that the Labor Department decreed a “$500 bond per child” admission fee and “approval of the Catholic Charities.” She found the Catholic lobby “incomprehensible,” since “the children are all Catholics, Basque children… made homeless and orphaned by the people who wish to destroy the Godless Reds. That must be the root of it somewhere, but it is pretty terrible.” Gellhorn noted that England and France welcomed the children and found it “amazing that only America should offer no sanctuary.” It seemed to Gellhorn both “an injustice” and a retreat from America’s tradition as a sanctuary. “What do you think about it?”

  ER supported the Quakers’ relief committee, sent a check to Allan Ward-well for his Spanish Children’s Fund, and publicly defended her right to aid Spain against all critics who attacked her for abetting communism. But in 1937 she also felt that European children would be happier in Europe, as close as possible to their families and culture. In a June column she wrote:

  The U.S. should bear as much of the expense as we possibly can, but it is against all modern ideas of what is good for children to uproot them and bring them to this country, where they are definitely cut off from all that they know and that would make them feel secure….

  It was hard for her to imagine, in 1937, a world filled with refugees uprooted and cut off from their soil and their culture. For the moment she trusted that Allan Wardwell’s AFSC efforts would create a national organization of various relief and rescue groups to coordinate all aid. She wrote Gellhorn: “Emotionally it is very easy to say that we should receive the children… but it requires a little more than emotion sometimes to do the right thing.”

  Gellhorn thought ER chastized her for being overemotional, she deplored emotional women, but:

  [It was] hard nowadays not to get emotionally terribly involved…. The attack on Bilbao is one of the nastiest things… when I think of those people in Bilbao strafed by low-flying airplanes with machine guns, and think of thirty shells a minute landing in the streets of Madrid, it makes me sick with anger….

  I can’t bear having the Spanish war turned into a Left and Right argument, because it is so much more than that, and increasingly it seems to me that the future of Europe is bound up in the outcome—–It also seems to me that the future of Europe is our future, no matter how much we want to be apart… our civilization is not divisible….

  ER encouraged Gellhorn: Her information was important, she had impressed many people, and a mutual friend had been “very deeply stirred by your perfectly remarkable address.” So, ER concluded: “Remember when you feel discouraged: We never know where we may have sowed the seeds of our own enthusiasm or of our own knowledge.”

  FDR’s blockade against the legitimate government of Spain disturbed ER even decades later. He attributed his decision to “political realities,” in particular the Roman Catholic vote.

  [But] this annoyed me very much. In the case of the Spanish Civil War… to justify his action, or lack of action, he explained to me, when I complained, that the League of Nations had asked us to remain neutral. By trying to convince me that our course was correct, though he knew I thought we were doing the wrong thing, he was simply trying to salve his own conscience…. It was one of the many times I felt akin to a hair shirt.

  Since FDR had never before concerned himself with collective security or felt bound by any League of Nations decision and was entirely careless concerning supplies to Mussolini when he sacked Ethiopia, his excuses were bewildering, and ER never accepted them. Ardent about Spain, ER rejected the propaganda war that equated the democratic front or “Popular Front” with communism. Despite the State Department’s emphasis on a war between fascism and communism, for many the primary enemy, ER was convinced the war was between democracy and fascism, for her the primary enemy.

  ER studied the situation, understood Spain’s history, and could not accept her husband’s policy.

  Spain had long been dominated by monarchy and feudal land ownership, but the new republic was voted into power by a vast majority in June 1931. King Alfonso had abdicated and fled in April, and the new democracy promised land reform, justice, and the participation of all classes and parties. A coalition government of trade unionists, liberal republicans, radical syndicalists, anarchists, socialists, and communists composed the Popular Front, while industrialists, landowners, military officers, monarchists, and Catholic fascists composed the National Front.

  In Spain’s February 1936 Popular Front election victory, the Communist Party represented only 4 percent of the government, and months of confusion, violence, mayhem followed. As Spain plunged into chaos, howls of rightist protest emerged from FDR’s State Department. On 23 July 1936, six days after Franco’s revolt, Cordell Hull wired FDR that the new Spanish government distributed arms and ammunition to “irresponsible members of left-wing political organizations.” Assistant Secretary James Clement Dunn told a reporter that the State Department regarded “the Spanish Government as a lot of hoodlums.”

  Before the election of 1936, FDR wanted to do nothing to upset the Roman Catholic vote. A Catholic “Hands Off Spain” committee condemned the Loyalists as atheists and communists. Even John L. Lewis announced he could not publicly support Loyalists because there were too many Catholics in the CIO and “it’s too dangerous for me.”

  Moreover, on 24 August 1936, FDR summoned J. Edgar Hoover to the White House to encourage a new FBI investigation policy of subversive groups. FDR wanted informants in every communist organization to collect general political intelligence. Throughout 1936 and 1937, FDR moved against communist inf
luence in U.S. labor unions, with as surprising, though secretive, verve as he did against Spain.

  In May 1937, the new government of Dr. Juan Negrin, physician, academic, former finance minister, and Socialist, was determined to be independent of communist domination. According to Hugh Thomas, Dr. Negrin had “no close relations” with Spain’s communist leaders and “a strong dislike for La Pasionaria,” Dolores Ibarruri, the leading Loyalist orator.

  Franco’s Falangists, or Catholic fascists, would have been quickly defeated had it not been for the military support of Hitler and Mussolini. “Beautiful, bleeding Spain” was torn apart not so much by civil war as by international fascist aggression. Most accounts agree the vast majority supporting the Popular Front would have ended the war quickly had they been able to get supplies to counter the might of Mussolini’s invading army, and the new Nazi Wehrmacht.

  According to Hamilton Fish Armstrong, longtime president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Spain “should have been a warning to civilized governments, but instead they adopted the strangling policy of nonintervention.”

  ER retained warm relations with the Popular Front Left, which supported Spain. During the 1937 Writers’ Congress, Gellhorn and Anna Louise Strong, also returned from Spain, discussed the future of the International Brigades and the president’s dismal policy. Gellhorn wrote:

  I saw Anna Louise Strong at the Writers’ Congress, which was a wonderful show, Carnegie Hall jammed—3500 and many turned away at the door—only to hear writers….

  [Anna Louise is] a great admirer of yours so I forgive her for being the messiest white woman alive and so overworked…. It seems I gave you an erroneous impression: she challenged me on my facts. Apparently you thought I said there were 12–14,000 Russian troops in Spain, but I said there were 12–14,000 International troops.