Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  I feel with you that things are not definitely settled and I can well imagine that Mile Souvestre with her feelings about minorities might be very unhappy. However, I cannot help being glad that the countries involved did not send thousands of young people to be killed over this particular question.

  The “deathwatch” of the summer and autumn of 1938 was informed by widespread knowledge of new munitions of destruction introduced since 1933. In 1929, Churchill had published The Aftermath, an amazing book of prescience: When the 1914–18 war ended, scientists and workers in a hundred laboratories, a thousand arsenals, and countless factories suspended their projects. “But their knowledge was preserved,” and they were poised to deliver weapons ever more “formidable and fatal.” From 1933 to 1938, they had created a new reality—already displayed in Ethiopia and Spain. Modern technology rendered military destruction “wholesale, unlimited, and perhaps, once launched uncontrollable.”

  Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue… it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination…. Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve… ready, if called on, to pulverise… what is left of civilization.

  As ER read the newspapers, she was convinced that if peace failed, unspeakable tragedy would follow. But to grant Hitler all he demanded was not peace. Horrified by fascist military triumphs in Asia and Europe, she wrote Elizabeth Baker, an absolute pacifist:

  I have never believed that war settled anything satisfactorily, but I am not entirely sure that some times there are certain situations in the world such as we have in actuality, when a country is worse off when it does not go to war for its principles than if it went to war…. I am afraid conditions in the rest of the world are going to decide that for us.

  In a world filled with propaganda, political warfare, lies, and deceit, America’s press was increasingly the only source of real news:

  Everywhere people listened as I did to their radios and I think read the papers with the same avidity. Since then taxi-drivers, hair dressers, sales girls… have talked to me about the situation with intelligence and a knowledge which shows their deep interest.

  Never before in history… have nations been armed for war and so close to war and yet not taken the first step, and I lay it largely to the awareness of the people and the force of public opinion on the leaders…. But as long as we have peace and an aroused public opinion, I shall hope that we may tackle our international problems with the same fervor which we are putting into the solution of some of our national problems.

  After her lecture tour through New England, ER went south to Kentucky and Tennessee, returned to Washington for her birthday week, and spent a day in Charlottesville with her youngest grandson, FDR III, who was a delight:

  A more placid, healthier baby I have rarely seen and even at three months old, he smiles back at you and, while you might object to a double chin in a year or so, it is really quite engaging in a baby!

  That evening, 9 October, she dined with Aubrey and Anita Williams, Ellen Woodward, Josephine Roche, and others. There was much discussion about the state of the world. They agreed about many issues, and ER seemed relieved that both “Aubrey and Josephine Roche have a good deal of sympathy with Mexico in her present position in retaking her [oil] lands if she will pay in the future.”

  Tensions over Mexico’s nationalization of its oil properties had simmered since April. FDR’s policy was to keep the region united against fascist penetration. His old Navy boss, Ambassador to Mexico Josephus Daniels, warned that Pan-American solidarity was needed to “save democracy. Oil ought not to smear it.” Despite Cordell Hull’s opposition to “communists” who disrespected and nationalized private property, and to agitation by oil interests, notably “Standard Oil,” which had “heavy investments in Mexico,” FDR supported President Lázaro Cárdenas’s right of eminent domain.

  The economic implications of good neighborliness and America’s response to nationalism and anti-imperialist activities changed as Europe readied for war—and fascists turned for military commerce to resource-rich Latin America. Indeed, in August the State Department created two new bureaus to improve relations with Latin America—a Division of Cultural Relations and a Division of International Communications. The goal was to exchange teachers and students, cooperate in music, art, and literature, and initiate “international radio broadcasts.” Sumner Welles said it was a modest beginning, and “not a propaganda agency.” But the goal was to enhance Cordell Hull’s reciprocal trade agreements and culturally improve hemispheric relations, since there was known “penetration, economic and intellectual, of the German and Italian dictatorships in Latin America.”

  On her birthday, 11 October 1938, ER received a poem from Harry Hopkins:

  MY DAY

  My Day is a dignified

  column

  It tells you right from

  wrong

  In the morning I’m dressing

  in Frisco

  At noon I lunch in

  Hong Kong.

  I fly way over Spain

  Because Franco is a pain

  And Hitler’s a terrible

  mug

  I tea with the Queen

  And Kennedy’s spleen

  The while I knit me a

  rug.

  I curtsy my best

  And hop over Brest

  And land at the White

  House door.

  My day’s hard on the legs

  But I scramble the eggs

  Bless you my children

  once more.

  Though ER thought she was inured to jokes about herself, she wrote to correct Harry:

  I enjoyed your poetic effort, but I must take issue with you. I never could tell anyone the difference between right and wrong. There are too many shades for me to ever be sure! I only wish I could cover all the lands you suggest!

  ER’s White House birthday celebration, without Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, even without Hick or Earl, was grand. FDR had arranged a splendid evening and gave her a birthday check with a jolly note: “Many Happy Returns! This is TOWARD the new ‘Lake Eleanor’ at ValKill. I will take you cruising on it.”

  The check was to help defray the costs of the controversial dredging that ER had done, which had so annoyed Cook and Dickerman. It was a considerate gift.

  Actually, ER’s fifty-fourth birthday seemed rather a state occasion. The New York Times ran two editorials celebrating her life and work. On 13 October, the paper surveyed her riding and sporting habits and noted that she “talks a great deal too.” But the previously critical tone reserved for such observations was now gone:

  This is not in the tradition of the wives of former Presidents. But she is so patently sincere and unpretentious in all she says and does, so ebulliently a part of every activity she undertakes, so good-humored even in the face of criticism, that she remains today one of the most popular women who ever lived in the White House. At 54 she could command a landslide of votes as Mrs. America.

  Other observers thought far beyond that. A poll taken by the New York League of Business and Professional Women nominated ER for governor of New York State, and at least one newspaper editorialized that ER should be nominated for president. Her nomination would avoid a third-term conflict for FDR, and in addition to “the prestige she may have won as wife of President Roosevelt, she merits the Presidency on the basis of her own personality and her performance.” Citing the careers of Catherine in Russia, Victoria in Britain, Isabella in Spain, and Wilhelmina in the Netherlands, the paper asked: “What sound reasons can be advanced against a woman for President of the U.S.?”

  ER’s birthday also coincided with the Women’s National Press Club party honoring “Good Queen Eleanor.” According to the New York Times, “the most noteworthy observation” made during the evening was the “total subsidence of the criticism to which she was subjected in her
first two years or so because she did not ‘stay home and tend to her knittin.’… One does not hear that any more.”

  ER’s birthday was not even dampened by family concerns. She minimized her mother-in-law’s meddlings and seemed now almost sympathetic to her intrusions. ER wrote Anna:

  I hope Granny is feeling well and that she can refrain… from trying to plan your lives! She seems to me to be aging fast but she still takes so much interest in us all that she would be glad to direct our actions even in the future!

  SDR, at eighty-four, worried about everything. She worried about the grandchildren, their children, and everybody’s future. She particularly worried about Hyde Park. She wanted some assurance that the estate would be retained by the family after her death. ER now felt protective of her mother-in-law and wished “she would not worry about my friends for I think she has reached an age when she should not bother about any one she does not like.”

  Publicly, ER praised SDR. She had summered in Campobello, and then gone off to Seattle:

  At eighty-four, this seems to me quite an achievement and I only hope that many of us will learn from this older generation how to preserve our interest in life and our desire to participate in the interests of the young. Certainly my husband’s mother is younger in spirit than many people whose years are far fewer than hers.

  ER seemed to put petty family annoyances in perspective that October:

  Too bad Curt had to tell Sis that he never liked me but after all in the end children have to make up their own minds as to whom they like and dislike.

  James, who possibly never forgave her opposition to his White House job or her contribution to the tensions with Betsey, was barely speaking to his mother:

  James has not said one word to me about his plans since I left him. He telephoned me once, and wired the day after my birthday and that is all I’ve heard….

  But ER was rarely in one place long enough to brood. The day after her birthday she lectured at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where she found the students “particularly happy and healthy and ready to absorb all the education available.” She returned that night just long enough to see films from Africa made “by our cousin Leila Roosevelt Dennis and her husband.” ER heartily recommended Dark Rapture; it “is really very beautiful and interesting.” She and Tommy left on the midnight train for the Midwest, for Missouri, Wisconsin, and Ohio. Then they headed south to Alabama, and to Columbia, South Carolina.

  At some point on her tour, ER spent a day in Atlanta, drove to “my grandmother’s old home in Roswell,” and inspected the new building going on at Warm Springs, “so I could tell my husband all that was being done.” Also she finally had a chance to see the Eleanor Roosevelt School. After FDR built a new brick school for the white children of Warm Springs, ER helped raise the money to build a modern brick school for the area’s black children. To put some meaning behind “separate but equal” in her husband’s adopted town seemed a little enough thing, but it inflamed white supremacists. Sixty years later some residents still complained about ER’s “interference.” She was proud of her achievement and grateful for FDR’s speech at the school’s dedication, in December 1937. They both understood that her school and his speech contributed to Georgia’s violent racialist campaign in 1938.

  On the road, ER wondered when she and Hick would “take our evening together before Xmas? We ought to plan it next time we meet!” ER wondered how they would “manage an occasional glimpse” of each other; but Hick indulged in her old fantasy of touring with ER through the Midwest:

  If you only weren’t the President’s wife—with all the fuss and pushing and hauling that goes with it—how I should love to travel with you to those places! But if you weren’t the President’s wife, the chances are you wouldn’t be going…. It would be a lot of fun if some day we could just go off bumming, looking at things, visiting all sorts of funny little towns. But that sort of traveling is expensive, isn’t it, when one is not on a job or a lecture trip. And I don’t think you are so keen about motor trips as you used to be. I’d still rather drive a car than do almost anything else I can think of!

  For the first time, ER rejected Hick’s fantasy and discouraged further musings about long trips:

  I doubt dear, if I’ll ever have the money to travel except on a money-making basis such as lecturing or writing and I cannot imagine that you would enjoy it even if I were not the President’s wife for one does of necessity so much one does not want to do. We can take short motor trips when I have more time someday and those, when I am no longer recognized wherever I go you will enjoy again.

  When ER returned she proposed a week together in Washington, and promised “to have time free part of [each] day and you might not mind it so much now….” Hick agreed, to ER’s surprise: “I’m delighted that you are considering my December invitation. I thought you had put the White House aside forever!”

  ER returned to a Washington poised for the midterm elections and faced painful dinner conversations about renewed labor strikes; the resurgence “of the KKK, vigilantes, etc.”

  After one weekend in Washington, and another in New York for Christmas shopping, ER left on 2 November alone, for an “entirely personal” visit to Seattle, where she was present at the delivery of Anna’s third child, John Boettiger, Jr. Anna wrote Tommy:

  You would have got a tremendous kick out of seeing mother selling my Seattle physician on the idea that she must be allowed to don a nurse’s mask and uniform to watch the actual arrival. This doctor is, unfortunately, a strong and very reactionary Republican, so that sometimes I am sure he would like to punch my nose, and I sure have felt like punching his…. But after all, I’m producing a baby and not a political machine….

  Delayed by a blizzard, ER reached Hyde Park just in time “to join the President and his mother at the polls.”

  The midterm elections of 1938 were disastrous. Except for the reelections of New York’s Senator Robert Wagner and Governor Herbert Lehman (vigorously challenged by Thomas Dewey), which were of great personal concern to both ER and FDR and were markedly narrow victories, the results nationally were a triumph for anti-New Deal forces. Michigan’s Governor Frank Murphy was defeated by Dies Committee accusations that he was a Red communist anti-industry unionist. In the South, every anti-New Deal candidate FDR opposed in his “purge” campaign was reelected. New conservative leaders appeared, including Senator Robert Taft of Ohio—son of President Howard Taft, and a fervent isolationist.

  Republicans in the House doubled, from 88 to 170, and increased in the Senate by eight. Although Democrats nominally controlled Congress, it was now overwhelmingly dominated by Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans who despised labor unions, New Deal liberals, and ER particularly.

  Amazingly buoyant, FDR wrote Josephus Daniels in Mexico that he was “wholly reconciled” to the results, which he felt “on the whole helpful.” The election cleaned out “some bad local situations,” and FDR predicted the next Congress would be “less trouble” than the last. At least he had sent a clear message: “I am sufficiently honest to decline to support any conservative Democrat.”

  ER admired FDR’s courage in battle and under attack. After all, he often said, “once you’ve spent two years trying to wiggle one toe, everything is in proportion!”

  But the election results quickly changed the national mood. A month earlier, Hallie Flanagan warned ER about “libelous misinformation” being circulated to destroy the Federal Arts Projects, initiated by Martin Dies’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Flanagan sent ER a report which refuted every charge, so she would not be “inconvenienced.”

  ER had replied, casually: “I never worry about the hearings, but I will ask you if I ever want to know a specific thing.” After the elections, the Dies Committee became far more worrisome, and ER condemned its tactics as “Gestapo-like.” But in November 1938, ER was more concerned with Gestapo violence throughout Nazi-controlled countries.

  Between 9 and
15 November, Jewish homes, schools, hospitals, synagogues, businesses, and cemeteries were invaded, plundered, burned. Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, was a week of contempt, abuse, destruction.

  If anybody doubted the intent of Hitler’s words, so clearly revealed in his writings, speeches, and previous outrages, those November days in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland shattered any illusion. The violence coincided with Armistice Day, 11 November, when the Allies ended World War I. The defeat of that war was for Hitler to be avenged with new blood, and unlimited terror.

  The violence began on 28 October, when Germany expelled thousands of Polish Jews who had lived for decades within the historically changing borders of Germany. Nazis rounded up children and old people on the streets, emptied houses and apartment buildings, allowed people to take nothing with them except 10 marks ($4) and the clothes they wore, shoved them into waiting trucks and trains, and dumped them across the border onto the desolate flats of Poland’s borderlands. More than ten thousand Jews were deported in this manner.

  Among the deportees was the family of Zindel Grynszpan, whose seventeen-year-old son, Heschel, had previously fled the family home in Hanover to Paris. When he received a letter from his father recounting his family’s ordeal, Heschel Grynszpan bought a gun and on 7 November walked to the German embassy in Paris to assassinate the ambassador. Ironically, he was detained by a minor official, Ernst vom Rath, who was himself under investigation by the Gestapo for his opposition to the increasing anti-Semitic violence, and shot him. This murder was the immediate excuse used to launch the well-orchestrated burnings, lootings, and round-ups known as Kristallnacht.

  Then on 12 November, German Jews were fined a billion marks—$400 million—as penalty for the murder. This “money atonement” was astronomical and rendered it virtually impossible for most Jews to retain sufficient savings to emigrate. Yet another decree ordered the victims to pay for the repair and restoration of their former shops, buildings, and homes—from which they were permanently banished.