Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Born in Germany, Karl Ohm became a U.S. citizen in 1929. While he was Protestant, his wife was Jewish. In October 1932, Ohm was arrested during a demonstration called by the International Labor Defense to protest “an unusually severe sentence meted out to a Negro.”

  Upon his release, deportation charges were filed. He admitted being a member of the ILD, explaining that in Germany, “all of the great professors” were members, even Albert Einstein. He “did not think it a crime,” and he had never been a communist.

  The case went to the Labor Department for interpretation. Extensions were granted, but on 1 January 1938 they had expired, and he was ordered to sail back to Germany. Were he expelled from the United States as a communist, having also married “a Jewess, there is no question as to what his fate in Germany will be.” The Labor Department granted him voluntary departure to any nation “not adjacent to the U.S.” Both England and Belgium refused visas.

  Lillian Strauss, headworker of the New York section of the National Council of Jewish Women, appealed to civil libertarian lawyers Morris Ernst, Carol King, and Arthur Garfield Hays; to labor activists Rose Schneiderman and Vito Marcantonio; and to others. All the old questions were again on America’s political agenda. Did communists deserve free speech? Since the Communist Party was “a legal party,” why was “it a crime for an alien to be interested”?

  According to Strauss, Frances Perkins’s Labor Department still enforced the law amended during the Red Scare in 1920, “making the deportation of aliens mandatory,” if they were communists. Although Ohm had never been a communist, he was about to be stripped of his citizenship and deported.

  Ohm was a popular masseur; his only crime had been to protest “an injustice.” He had been brutalized by the police and required several stitches. Everything about the case stirred fear for the future. Would ER do something?

  We are assisting refugees to escape from abroad and to adjust to a newer and freer life in our country. Can we sit passively by and permit our government to send this young man… back to his certain fate into the welcoming arms of Mr. Hitler?

  ER referred the case with a plea to Perkins; she sent it off to James Houghteling, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Because Ohm’s membership in a subversive organization “appeared somewhat unconclusive,” Houghteling canceled the deportation order. With profound gratitude, Strauss wrote that ER’s interest and assistance had freed the couple “from a five year bondage of fear and spiritual suffering.”

  Other examples of random violence associated with the renewed Red Scare were sent to ER that spring. Upton Sinclair appealed to her to join civil libertarians dismayed when Socialist leader Norman Thomas was rudely pulled off a platform and arrested by New Jersey police while he attempted to address a rally for the Workers Defense League. When his wife tried to find out where they were taking him, she was punched in the face.

  Arthur Vanderbilt, president of the American Bar Association, defended Thomas, and many prominent Americans spoke out against the outrage, including Alf Landon. Upton Sinclair asked ER to inform Mayor Frank Hague, an official of the National Democratic Committee, that it was impolite “in a democracy” to punch “a lady.”

  Throughout 1938, ER opposed the rising tide of violence and bigotry in America. She was distressed by Congress’s assaults on the New Deal and the sweeping intentions of its new House committee to investigate un-American activities, launched in March under the chairmanship of Texas Democrat Martin Dies.

  ER personally campaigned to allow German composer Hanns Eisler and his wife, Lou Eisler, into the country. A well-known radical who protested fascism everywhere, Hanns Eisler had condemned racism in America and wrote The Ballad of Black Jim with Bertolt Brecht in 1932. Its vivid depiction of the oppression of a Negro subway rider “In Manhattan/In Manhattan” was lambasted. But Eisler’s supporters vowed he was no communist.

  ER sent Sumner Welles the many papers brought to her by someone she considered “a perfectly honest person.” He was “very much disturbed” because the State Department had “told the Cuban Consul that they do not wish to admit [the Eislers].” He was certain they would consider “our form of Government ‘heaven.’” ER believed the Labor Department “did not examine the case carefully enough. Why not do it all over again and bring it out in the open and let the Eislers defend themselves?”

  Throughout the spring, ER’s attention returned to Europe. In one column she wrote:

  I have reached a point where I open the paper every morning with apprehension…. It seems incredible that human beings can risk another world upheaval when they realize what the last one meant to everyone.

  Although ER never referred to specific nations in print, on 17 March she wrote privately to Elinor Morgenthau about the terrible and depressing situation in Austria and Spain.

  In Europe, the Anschluss changed everything. The cruelty of Austria’s Nazis emboldened fascists everywhere and became the new model of behavior: hard, immediate, personal, pitiless.

  Only one syndicated woman columnist was more popular than Eleanor Roosevelt in 1938: Dorothy Thompson, who appeared in more than a hundred newspapers. Virtually alone among America’s leading columnists, she was “On the Record” with outrage at FDR’s silence. In Austria, “every gallant soul I have ever known—from the highest aristocracy to the last intelligent trade union leader—is dead, murdered or a suicide; or is in prison, in concentration camp, or in exile.” The complacent west, the leaders of liberal democracy, she wrote, must confront critical choices: Take “a last stand against heavy odds” or go “under for generations.”

  Thompson earned her reputation as Cassandra by continually blasting the official policy of “ostrichism” and appeasement. She detailed both Hitler’s excesses and the “‘cowardice’ that sustained it.”

  The aftermath of Germany’s victory and the agonies of Vienna’s Jews were well known in Anglo-American circles. By the spring of 1938 Churchill was no longer alone in Parliament when he warned of unbridled Nazi ambitions, flaccid British defenses, coming world disaster.

  Harold Nicolson, who had been partly responsible for Czechoslovakia and other geographic changes at Versailles, began to meet with Churchill in small groups of anguished concern. Indeed, by February, Nicolson felt he could no longer support appeasement, or represent his own National Labour Party—which “has behaved like worms and kissed the Chamberlain boot with a resounding smack.” He offered to resign as vice-chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

  On 25 February he reported the extraordinary scene to his wife, Vita Sackville-West. After a singularly nasty event in a packed room, it was determined that his resignation would embarrass the government. At least Nicolson and his allies might wait until public “feeling had diminished.” Then:

  Winston in all his majesty rose and said that they were being mean and petty… and he must insist on a vote, either Yes or No. They then voted. Those in favour of our not resigning were unanimous except for one little vicious hand against. That hand was the hand of Nancy Astor.

  We then adjourned in some excitement. In’ the corridor a friend of mine called Alan Graham [Conservative MP, 1935–45] came up to Nancy and said, “I do not think you behaved very well.” She turned upon him and said, “Only a Jew like you would dare to be rude to me.” He replied, “I should much like to smack your face.” I think she is a little mad.

  Coincidentally, that same day ER and Nancy Astor were together on an international hookup broadcasting to the world on the importance of women in world affairs. The broadcast was sponsored by the International Federation of Business and Professional Women, and neither ER nor her friend Lady Astor said anything very controversial. All seven women, including representatives from Italy, France, Norway, and Switzerland, emphasized the importance of peace.

  Nancy Astor advised women to “help preserve freedom” and to protest against materialism and the concept that might makes right. ER spoke last and very briefly. She called upon w
omen to work for peace and declared that neither men nor women should be deprived of educational opportunities or their full rights as citizens under law.

  Although Nancy Astor had created a transatlantic stir in 1937, when she proclaimed that peace would be advanced by an Anglo-German accord, her views were then not very different from those expressed by FDR’s personal envoys to Europe. Bill Bullitt struggled to arrange a French-German accord, and Joseph Kennedy—recently appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—became immediately identified with Lady Astor’s Cliveden circle.

  ER never understood FDR’s diplomatic choices. She considered Bullitt untrustworthy and unpredictable, “clever” but mercurial. She ultimately came to despise Joe Kennedy, but in 1938 merely distrusted him. At a dinner in December, attended by Dorothy Schiff Backer, ER asked why FDR had appointed “that awful Joe Kennedy,” who was by then not only a known enemy of the New Deal but a continual critic of FDR personally.

  Although Henry Morgenthau had written in his diary that FDR “considered Kennedy a very dangerous man,” when ER confronted her husband, he threw his head back and laughed: “Appointing an Irishman to the Court of St. James” was “a great joke, the greatest joke in the world.” Evidently, nobody else laughed.

  ER was also troubled by FDR’s abrupt removal of William Dodd from his post in Germany just before Christmas. Dodd hated fascism, refused to attend Nazi ceremonies, boycotted the annual Nuremberg Party rallies, presented insulting lectures on Jeffersonian democracy, and stayed largely in his study writing his history of the South. At Bullitt’s suggestion, Dodd was replaced by Hugh Wilson—considered much more acceptable in German circles.

  Moreover, there had been no breach between the Roosevelts and the Astors. In 1937, Nancy Astor dined at the White House when she was in the United States on a private trip to visit her brother. And Nancy was known to be loyal to her old friends. It was, therefore, understandable that Felix Frankfurter turned to her for help when he learned that his most beloved eighty-two-year-old uncle, Dr. Solomon Frankfurter, an esteemed scholar and chief librarian at the University of Vienna, was among the 76,000 herded into concentration camps during the first days of the Anschluss.

  All his earlier letters to FDR from England and Palestine in 1933 and 1934 concerning Hitler and Europe had been blithely ignored, simply lost in the blather of other business. Now the situation was urgent, deadly. Rather than risk the wobbles of State Department scrutiny, and a slow, careless, or devious response. Frankfurter turned to Lady Astor. Her reputation for audacity had in no way been tarnished by her newer reputation as a pro-German leader of the “Cliveden crowd.”

  Asked to intervene with her “German friends,” she wrote Frankfurter in May:

  Dear Friend:

  The minute I received your wire I spoke to the German Ambassador in London, and gave him, in no uncertain terms, our views on arresting aged scholars. He promised to do what he could. Three days afterwards, having heard no more, I talked to him again and warned him that unless I received good news of Herr Frankfurter, I should go myself to Vienna! He assured me that it would be alright. As you know, your uncle was released on 28th March. The Ambassador [von Ribbentrop’s successor, Herbert von Dirksen] tells me that he was only imprisoned a few days as a result of some unguarded remarks.

  Deeply grateful, Frankfurter nevertheless used the occasion to inquire about Nancy Astor’s views, and an extraordinary exchange on Cliveden and appeasement ensued. But in England, Nancy Astor’s collaborationist views were challenged by the news, which worsened daily, and cracks in the wall of appeasement began to appear in London where Harold Nicolson dramatically reflected ER’s views. On 6 June 1938, Nicolson confided in his diary:

  Our isolationists must see by now that isolation is not enough….

  Chamberlain (who has the mind and manner of a clothes-brush) aims only at assuring temporary peace at the price of ultimate defeat….

  People of the governing classes think only of their own fortunes, which means hatred for the Reds. This creates a perfectly artificial but at present most effective secret bond between ourselves and Hitler. Our class interests, on both sides, cut across our national interests. I go to bed in gloom.

  Nicolson was even more distressed after he met an Austrian “who had just got away from Vienna, and what he said made me ill.” He wrote Vita:

  [Nazi soldiers] rounded up the people walking in the Prater on Sunday last, and separated the Jews from the rest. They made the Jewish gentlemen take off all their clothes and walk on all fours on the grass. They made the old Jewish ladies get up into the trees by ladders and sit there. They then told them to chirp like birds. The Russians never committed atrocities like that. You may take a man’s life; but to destroy all his dignity is bestial…. The suicides have been appalling….

  England’s official policy of unconcern was consecrated by widespread Hitler worship. Social conversation revealed British support for every atrocity. Nicolson noted that Unity Mitford adored but “does not hope to marry Hitler…. Hitler likes her because of her fanaticism. She wants the Jews to be made to eat grass.”

  Hitler counted on such approval. In the United States such views were represented by a wide range of congressional and diplomatic opinion, and during these critical days they were most dangerously expressed by Charles Lindbergh and Joseph Kennedy in England. According to Nicolson, Lindbergh’s exaggerated report of Nazi airpower froze Britain’s nerve.

  ER was revolted when America’s most celebrated hero became a major propaganda weapon for Hitler and accepted a Nazi medal for his services to the Reich. On 22 May, Lindbergh visited Sissinghurst and detailed the findings of his European tour. Nicolson recorded:

  He says that we cannot possibly fight since we should certainly be beaten. The German Air Force is ten times superior to that of Russia, France and Great Britain put together. Our defences are simply futile…. He thinks we should just… make an alliance with Germany.

  Nicolson “discounted” Lindbergh’s report: After all, “he believes in the Nazi theology.” It was “all tied up with his hatred of degeneracy and his hatred of democracy as represented by the free Press and the American public.” Nevertheless, Nicolson wrote in his diary, England was “outmastered in the air.” Despite the evening news, which celebrated “a perfect summer day,” Nicolson considered it “the most anxious and unhappy day that I can remember.”

  While the sun encouraged the azaleas and irises at Sissinghurst, ER too had moments of respite from the horror reported from Europe each day. In the country in May, she worked in her garden at Val-Kill; the violets were in bloom, and she pruned her exquisite apricot rose bushes. One morning as she watched the birds fly from tree to tree from her outside sleeping porch, she wondered “if they are getting their breakfast, or building their nests, or just working up an appetite with early morning exercise.”

  But when she saw a newsreel of the devastation in China and the bombardment of Barcelona, she felt “positively disgusted with human beings. How can we be such fools as to go senselessly taking human life in this way? Why the women in every nation do not rise up and refuse to bring children into a world of this kind is beyond my understanding.”

  Since ER’s Lysistrata solution of a women’s strike for peace coincided with a major effort to persuade FDR to lift the embargo, we can only wonder what the words between them actually were. Several days after that newsreel, she “lunched with a friend high up in the Empire State Building. We sat at a window looking out over the city, which always takes my breath away.” But as she gazed down at the city she so admired, a “horrible thought” intruded, and she wondered “what it would be like with planes flying over it dropping bombs….”

  News of stalemate, the bravery of the Loyalist army and underequipped International Brigades, and the suffering Spanish people captured her imagination. In 1938 she spent more time with the young activists of the American Youth Conference, who planned to go or had just returned from Spain. According to
Joseph Lash, whom ER had first met in January 1936 at a White House tea attended by five members of the AYC National Council after a meeting to promote the American Youth Act, ER’s sympathies were “passionately engaged upon the Loyalist side. She loved to hear the ‘Six Songs of the International Brigade’ and for many years kept on her desk a little bronze figure of a youthful Spanish militiaman in coveralls that was a symbol of the Republican cause.”

  FDR’s continued insistence on a strictly enforced blockade against Loyalist Spain remained incomprehensible to her. Now, bipartisan liberal opposition was aroused. Even isolationist senators Borah and Nye, who had opposed it as unjust and unneutral, now promoted legislation to end the embargo. ER was hopeful. Ickes met with Chicago Tribune correspondent Jay Allen, who was fired because of his reports from the front: “Jay Allen came in to see me yesterday…. He is outraged over our embargo on munitions…. He thinks, and I agree with him, that this is a black page in our history.”

  Ickes blamed the president’s policy on career State Department officials who “sit at the feet” of Britain’s Foreign Office. Jay Allen called FDR’s neutrality policy “an instrument of wanton destruction” with devastating long-term consequences.

  On 12 May, Ickes met with FDR and asked about rumors he was “ready to lift the embargo.” FDR replied that he was “opposed to doing anything about it.” Ickes protested that “the embargo should never have been imposed.” But FDR was adamant. He said Spain could not afford to buy munitions even if the embargo was lifted, and they could not pass through the now closed French frontier.

  [FDR] said frankly that to raise the embargo would mean the loss of every Catholic vote next fall and that the Democratic Members of Congress were jittery about it and didn’t want it done.

  So, Ickes wrote with disgust, that ended the story: