Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  This was the cat that was actually in the bag, and it is the mangiest, scabbiest cat ever. This proves up to the hilt what so many people have been saying, namely, that the Catholic minorities in Great Britain and America have been dictating the international policy with respect to Spain.

  But the story did not end for ER. She donated money for aid to private groups, especially the American Friends Service Committee, and continually fought propaganda that praised Franco’s war against anti-Catholic communists.

  Toward the end of May she listened to Ambassador Claude Bowers’s broadcast from the U.S. embassy at St. Jean de Luz:

  I was very much impressed by the tragic things which he related as everyday occurrences in the lives of Spanish children. Probably a million children, undernourished, inadequately clothed, many dying from the slow torture of starvation, many sick and many wounded and many fatherless and motherless and homeless….

  She joined Bowers’s plea for Americans to “live up to our past reputation… [and] care for the children of other nations, no matter what our attitude might be toward the government involved.”

  But aid for refugees and orphaned children was no longer enough. In June, ER sought to circumvent her husband’s blockade and participated in a rather wild escapade with her brother Hall. On 21 June 1938, Bill Bullitt wrote a “Personal and Confidential” letter to FDR:

  This is a very private letter which requires no answer.

  Some days ago I received a telegram from Mrs. Roosevelt informing me that Hall was coming to Paris and asking me to do anything I could for him.

  Then France’s new foreign minister, Georges Bonnet, a peace-at-any-price appeaser, told Bullitt that the Spanish ambassador “informed him that the Spanish Government could buy more than one hundred planes in the United States at once for immediate delivery to Spain via France” and wanted the French frontier reopened to military shipments. Bullitt was astounded to hear that FDR personally “approved the sale of these planes to the Spanish Government and that you were arranging for the evasion of the Neutrality Act.” Bullitt expressed his “skepticism to Bonnet and telegraphed the [State] Department for immediate instructions.”

  Then Hall telephoned Bullitt to announce that he was in Paris, with his son Daniel, who wanted to volunteer in Spain. Bullitt invited them to a ball, and Hall arrived for an urgent conversation:

  When Hall came in at 4:15 this afternoon, he said that he, acting through Harold Talbott of Cleveland, had managed to gather for the Spanish Government approximately 150 new and second-hand planes of various makes—all of which he specified. He said that he had discussed this transaction with you and that it had your entire approval. He stated that you and he and Jimmy had discussed all the details and that you had agreed to wink at the evasion of the Neutrality Act involved, because of your interest in maintaining the resistance of the Spanish Government against Franco….

  Bullitt “expressed no opinion” to Hall, but informed him that U.S. policy “was to oppose absolutely the giving of licenses for shipments of planes to Spain via France.” Hall “replied that you had thought of writing to me,” but since “he would arrive in Paris as quickly as a letter you had preferred to have him explain the matter to me by word of mouth.” The conversation continued:

  I informed Hall also that the French Government had closed the frontier to Spain absolutely; that the French Government had a real hope that the volunteers might be withdrawn at last from both sides in Spain and that the British were pushing for an armistice pending the withdrawal of volunteers. I told him that I could not imagine a moment more unpropitious for an attempt to organize the shipment of planes to Spain in contravention of the wishes of the British and French Governments and our own Neutrality Act.

  After Hall left, Bullitt received confirmation from the State Department and a telegram from Sumner Welles that U.S. policy was unchanged.

  Bullitt concluded his query about this familial effort to bypass FDR’s blockade:

  I have not the slightest desire to know what lies behind this expedition of Hall’s, and I am writing this letter for your own eye and no one else’s, merely because I feel that since your name has been used by the Spanish Government in its conversations with the French Government, you ought to have a full account of the facts.

  FDR would not have advised ER or her brother to contact Bullitt if he had wanted the planes to get through. Bullitt believed air travel rendered “Europe an absurdity.” As he flew from Munich to Venice, he “crossed Austria in fifteen minutes.” But instead of considering European amity and unity, these “dinky little European states” faced the future submerged in “national hatreds” and on the brink of “destroying themselves completely and handing Europe over to the Bolsheviks.”

  That, in the end, dictated all appeasement efforts, including FDR’s committment to the blockade—which was ignored only to allow US supplies to reach Franco.*

  ER never acccepted the abandonment of Spanish democracy, and she referred to it again and again. Even during her visit to London during the war, at a small dinner party hosted by the Churchills, attended by Tommy and Henry Morgenthau, among others, ER and Winston had “a slight difference of opinion,” which she detailed: When the prime minister asked Henry Morgenthau if the United States was now sending sufficient supplies to Spain, ER interrupted to suggest “it was a little too late.” The time to send supplies to Spain had been when it might have been possible “to help the Loyalists during their civil war”:

  Mr. Churchill said he had been for the Franco government until Germany and Italy went into Spain to help Franco. I remarked that I could not see why the Loyalist government could not have been helped, and the prime minister replied that he and I would have been the first to lose our heads if the Loyalists had won….

  I said that losing my head was unimportant, whereupon he said: “I don’t want you to lose your head and neither do I want to lose mine.”

  At that moment Clementine Churchill “leaned across the table” to agree with ER: “I think perhaps Mrs. Roosevelt is right.” Her remark evidently “annoyed” the prime minister who exploded: “I have held certain beliefs for sixty years and I’m not going to change now.” It was not a congenial dinner: “Mrs. Churchill then got up as a signal that dinner was over.”

  With their effort to get planes through the blockade aborted, Hall and his son Danny went to Spain. Danny stayed for six weeks to interview members of the International Brigades. He described his efforts in letters home. He stayed for a time with the brigade that had just crossed the Ebro and was resting after a long battle. At night “as many as fifty or sixty bombers and pursuit planes” were overhead. Ill-equipped, mostly in sandals, the men were nevertheless “in good spirits.” Danny asked why they had come, “Frenchmen, Englishmen, Americans, Austrians, Poles, and expatriated Germans and Italians.” He was surprised that most of their answers were the same: “to fight fascism.” He asked if they were communists, and if they were fighting for communism. About 30 percent said they were communists, but “invariably” they said they were “fighting to give Spain a chance to work out her own government.”

  Danny interviewed Alvah Bessie, who had been fired from the Brooklyn Eagle because the Roman Catholic Church objected to his reportage. When he told Bessie he was writing down every word, Bessie said, “Please don’t make it too silly.” And tell them: “I’m more of a pacifist than ever, we all are; that’s what we’re fighting for mostly. The world doesn’t realize what it’s doing allowing fascism a free hand.”

  Her nephew’s observations, along with those of everyone she spoke with during the spring and summer of 1938, confirmed ER’s convictions.

  For so long muffled about international events, ER was now in active opposition to her husband’s policies. Although there is no record of her words with FDR over Hall’s airplane expedition, which she supported, she was blunt about her support for Spain.

  In recognition of her support for Loyalist Spain, she was given a gift of Go
ya’s famous series Los Proverbios, eighteen etchings, drawn from the original plates in Madrid and completed on 9 November 1937. According to Herbert Matthews, the New York Times columnist in Spain:

  The idea of this edition was primarily to raise foreign currency for the hard-pressed Loyalists, but also to prove that reverence for Spanish art was as great among the so-called “Reds” as among their critics abroad. So, the famous engraver Adolfo Ruperez was commissioned to make 150 sets of the four great Goya series.

  The first five of these, on Antique Japan paper, were destined for very special presentation, and were accompanied by a map of Madrid to indicate “where bombs had dropped while the work was being done.” Set Number Two went to Eleanor Roosevelt.

  She insisted on her right to keep it, despite loud public protests that she was partisan, unneutral, anti-Catholic, procommunist. ER declared: “I am not neutral…. I believe in Democracy and the right of a people to choose their own government without having it imposed on them by Hitler and Mussolini.”

  *Romania’s king appointed a fascist premier, although his party “won only nine percent of the vote… thus disregarding the popular will of his country.” The Nazi press already had sixty newspapers there, and Romania received aid from Germany and Italy. It represented the end of France’s alliance with the Little Entente.

  * If she knew of it, ER must have been particularly galled by the one-sided nature of the blockade that strangled democratic Spain: Franco’s Insurgency was supplied by Standard Oil, the U.S.-owned Vacuum Oil Company in Tangier, and the Texas Oil Company (Texaco) from the beginning; and on credit, which was contrary to the neutrality legislation. According to Herbert Feis, Franco received 1,866,000 metric tons of oil and 12,800 trucks from the U.S. between 1936 and 1939—on credit. According to Herbert L. Matthews: “No oil was sold by American companies to the Republicans, ostensibly on the theory that Loyalist ports were unsafe whereas the Insurgent harbors were open and protected.”

  26: Race Radicals, Youth and Hope

  While Europe was on a deathwatch, ER was encouraged by the vitality and vision of a burgeoning youth movement and felt increasingly drawn to their activities. Also in the spring and summer of 1938, some of ER’s happiest days were spent with Aubrey Williams’s extended circle of Southern liberals and race radicals who met regularly in the home of Alabama’s Clifford and Virginia Durr. ER worked with them to create a liberal Southern movement, and fully confront race issues.

  In April, she addressed the seventieth anniversary celebration of the founding of Hampton Institute, the historically black Virginia college opened by the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War. In a speech that emphasized leadership in “a very changing world,” ER urged the students to prepare themselves for responsibility “not only for your race, but for all the people in this nation.”

  Since democracy required educated citizens and ignorance represented its “greatest danger,” their most important challenge “is to see that in this nation there is no such thing as ignorance.” ER appreciated that it was a daunting task, since America fell “far short” of its promise for “an equal opportunity for education.”

  ER said: “Know what you want” as public citizens; then campaign for it, “not for yourselves alone, but… so that the whole community may have the opportunity to live decently.”

  ER compared the plight of “minority groups” with the status of women before the suffrage. Only activism, organized pressure, would achieve influence and success. That was essential, ER concluded, because “democracy today is on trial as a form of government in the world….”

  The United States could no longer ignore its undemocratic practices: “We have to make our nation serve the needs of the whole people. We cannot have one section of the nation suffer and the rest of the nation prosper,” and we cannot allow injustice and violence to continue.

  ER’s words might have been dismissed as mere platitudes had she not bolstered them by activities to change the social ills she protested. Throughout 1938 she worked with Lucy Randolph Mason, who reported on the difficulties of building unionism in the South. ER sent her checks for families in distress, passed on her reports to FDR, and sought to help end the scourge of Southern poverty and violence.

  Mason’s CIO campaign met intimidation, coercion, and fraud; industrial spies and detective agencies; vigilante violence and Red Scare activity. “One feels the sinister suppression of democracy by civil authorities” every day wherever the Textile Workers tried to organize. “It is hard to keep calm,” Lucy Randolph Mason wrote ER. “Well, thank God Mr. Roosevelt is President and you are you.”

  According to Mason:

  The only hope for progressive democracy in the South lies in the lower economic groups—particularly the wage earner. The power holding group, meaning the capitalists and manufacturers and business men, are distinctly reactionary and as a rule opposed to the present Administration….

  Among the rank and file… both in the cities and on the land, the President is adored. Yet this is the group so largely disfranchised by the poll tax requirements of eight southern states….

  Mason’s crusade was part of a radical effort to restore the region, end the nation’s “most extreme” poverty, and enhance the political and purchasing power of its citizens. She sent the First Lady books to read, tasks to perform. Mason warned ER that her reports were not for quotation: “I can criticise the South as severely as I please when in it and talking or writing to southern people, but the unpardonable offence is to criticise it outside or to the rest of the nation!”

  They met in Atlanta in March, when ER addressed the Georgia Rural-Urban Women, and again in New Orleans, and Mason lunched at the White House in April. FDR met with them, and after that meeting, he urged the poll tax be added to the agenda of the new committee they formed to launch the Southern Conference on Human Welfare (SCHW) at a South-wide meeting in Montgomery, Alabama.

  The purpose of the SCHW was immodest. Mason and her allies Clark Foreman, Joe Gelders, Judge Louise Charlton, and Virginia Durr, among others, intended to transform the South. ER agreed to keynote their first meeting in November. They saw their effort as part of FDR’s “concern for the economic rehabilitation of the South.”

  Everyone concerned about justice was encouraged when shortly after their April meeting, the president finally broke his silence about possible federal action whenever a lynching occurred. Since the Gavagan-Wagner bill seemed forever doomed in Congress, FDR suggested empowering Hoover’s Justice Department agents (G-men) to investigate. Their findings might then be submitted to the attorney general for public prosecution, or to Congress to create “demand for prosecution.” FDR’s proposal was vague, and the NAACP made “no comment,” still preferring an actual law, and the “arrest and prosecution of perpetrators.”

  Also in April, FDR called for a world conference to aid the desperate plight of Jewish refugees from Hitler to be held in July at Evian in France. The NAACP sent a telegram applauding his determination, but asked that the government “be equally indignant at the lynchings of American citizens on U.S. soil.”

  ER, Mason, and the conveners of the SCHW believed that FDR was now committed to action. After decades of neglect, the plight of the South was being addressed at every level, and she pressed for action on every front. She demanded oversight of WPA and PWA funding for women’s prisons being built in Georgia and South Carolina. She learned that penologists were not consulted, and that there were underground rooms intended “for a punishment dungeon, which modern penologists abhor.” Aubrey Williams promised to investigate.

  She also protested discrimination “by private people” and WPA officials that resulted in the loss of many homes among Negro homeowners in Morgantown, West Virginia. ER wanted their loans extended, their homes refinanced. The local NAACP had turned to ER, and her protest initiated a thorough investigation. Lucy Randolph Mason considered ER “the most useful woman in America.”

  ER spent the summer of 1938 almost exc
lusively at Hyde Park. Her decision to stay put coincided with her new involvement with the student activists of the American Youth Congress, who were to host an historic second World Youth Congress at Vassar, which she agreed to address.

  ER first met the radical leaders of the AYC in January 1936 when they arrived in Washington to protest the National Youth Administration, which they did not know was ER’s idea. They condemned the NYA as a condescending sham. Rather, they argued, there should be a $3.5 billion youth unemployment relief bill. ER and Aubrey Williams believed there were no grounds for conflict, and sought an alliance.

  After their first meeting, ER agreed to talk with them privately at their national council meeting. The militant students were impressed by ER’s candor. According to Joseph Lash, then head of the American Student Union, ER had within an hour “transformed an adversary relationship into unabashed admiration.”

  ER told them firmly not to “make speeches to her.” She fully appreciated NYA’s limitations, and she appreciated their impatience. She invited them to tea at the White House, where the delegation was again confrontational. ER remained unrattled, and promised personal consideration for their urgent issues: unemployment, racial discrimination, union-busting, the militarization of youth. She intended to be “useful.” But they needed to be more political, and more polite.

  Williams was more impatient with the arrogance of AYC leaders and irately walked out of several meetings. ER enjoyed their fresh vitality and dismissed their arrogance as youthful determination. She observed their inner political battles with an expansive and maternal eye.

  When NYA administrator Mark McCloskey wrote to tell the First Lady he was fascinated by her “patience and tact” during hours of questions and general badgering, she replied: “I have so much sympathy for those youngsters it is never hard to be patient.” Besides, they reminded her of her own sons: brash, assertive, argumentative. Unsure, surrounded by unemployment and dreadful problems, they pursued a better world; she wanted to be helpful.