by Susan Quinn
The Trylon and the Perisphere were embroidered on the uniforms of the Yankees, the New York Giants, and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Medallions of the structures decorated New York license plates. Even Hick’s stationery was topped by an image of the two icons. On opening day, Eleanor wore a brown silk dress printed with Trylons and Perispheres, along with matching hat and bag. Eleanor explained in “My Day” that the dress was designed by “my young niece” (Hall’s daughter Eleanor) and had been “bought by a department store that makes many of my clothes.”
Despite the mind-numbing promotion, the objects themselves elicited near-universal admiration. Even Hick, a selective admirer of the fair, was moved by the sight of the Perisphere at night. “It is very, very beautiful dear,” she wrote Eleanor a few days before the opening. “The big white globe looks like a giant, transparent, iridescent soap bubble. It actually seems to float on the fountains underneath it! And the colors and the reflections in the pools—gorgeous.”
On that cool May night, Eleanor returned with Hall and his daughter to see for herself. A sad event hovered over the visit: two weeks before, Hall’s son Danny—the same one involved in the wrestling match at Val-Kill—had been killed when he flew his small plane into the side of a mountain in Mexico. But tragedy was no reason, in the Roosevelt family, not to carry on. The little group, all bundled up in their car chairs, succeeded in remaining anonymous as they took in the spectacle. They returned home not long before midnight, after an evening Eleanor deemed “delightful.”
“I have seen the fireworks and fountains in action at Versailles and am familiar with other displays of this kind,” Eleanor wrote in her column, “but, for the first time, they have found a way here to keep the color in the water right to the top of the spray.” It was “breathtakingly lovely.”
Eleanor continued to visit and promote the fair in “My Day” throughout the summer. She marveled at Futurama, General Motors’ ambitious three-dimensional car trip through the city and country of the future, savored the smorgasbord at the Danish Pavilion, and took special pleasure in the little houses in Tomorrow Town. She noted that “no one should go to this Fair with the idea that one or two visits will satisfy their curiosity.”
The fair was largely a corporate event, with the grandest buildings sponsored by railways, automobile and appliance manufacturers, and food producers like Heinz, which handed out one of the fair’s most coveted prizes, a green pickle pin. After all was said and done, such fairs inevitably offered, as one astute critic noted, “material comfort for those who can afford it; vulgar recreation for those who can’t.”
Yet there was good reason to root for the fair. With the Depression still deep and getting deeper again, the fair created tens of thousands of jobs, first for construction workers, who replaced an ugly and malodorous dump with a park and a temporary city. It also employed an impressive array of promising artists, including Jo Davidson, Arshile Gorky, Salvador Dalí, Alexander Calder, Philip Guston, and Rockwell Kent, who covered building façades with murals and punctuated pathways with sculpture. The artists might not have done their best work for the fair—a lot of it was in a style one critic called “modernoid”—but it at least tided them over. Finally, the fair gave jobs to all manner of guides and greeters and cleaners and gardeners, not to mention a large team of publicists, including Hick.
The pretext for the fair was the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration as the first president of the United States, which took place in New York City in 1789. But despite the sixty-five-foot statue of Washington that towered over the promenade, the GW who dominated the fair was without a doubt not George Washington but the fair president, Grover Whalen.
Whalen, aka “Mr. New York,” was the ultimate promoter: he had been the city’s “official greeter” in the 1920s, organizing parades and receptions for such celebrities as Charles Lindbergh and Queen Marie of Romania. After a flashy stint as New York police chief, during which he installed a statue of Napoleon in his office, Whalen had moved on to the World’s Fair, where he could give full rein to his grandiosity. He convinced Joseph Stalin, through an emissary, to build a $4 million pavilion by promising him the most desirable location on the fairgrounds. Then he used Stalin’s commitment to convince rivals and enemies to come on board. He traveled to Italy for a personal interview with Il Duce, persuading him that he could promote Italy’s vision of the future for a mere $5 million. By the time he was finished, Grover Whalen had promises from sixty-two nations—all the nations that, to quote the New York Times, “were not too busy with war or persecution to participate.” Germany and Spain were absent.
The World of Tomorrow, as envisioned by Whalen and the fair’s planners, was meant as a grand expression of a prosperous future after years of bleak deprivation and struggle. War was not part of the picture because Whalen didn’t believe in it. “My personal investigation in Europe has conclusively proved to me that there’ll be no war,” he told the New Yorker. “A wave of enthusiasm for the World’s Fair is sweeping Europe. That’s what Europe is thinking of now—not war.”
Only a few ventured to disagree. When asked to speak at the dedication of the Palestine Pavilion, Albert Einstein, a recent refugee from Hitler’s Germany, told the thousands listening attentively in the Court of Peace that “the World’s Fair . . . projects the world of men like a wishful dream. Only the creative forces are on show, none of the sinister and destructive ones which today more than ever jeopardize the happiness, the very existence of civilized harmony.”
Most Americans were too concerned about their own struggles, and too disillusioned by the last war, to take in such grave warnings. One hundred sixteen thousand Americans had lost their lives in the Great War, a war many believed had been fruitless. Isolationism ran deep, in both the general population and in the political leadership. “Let us turn our eyes inward,” Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor George Earle declared in 1935, “and preserve our own oasis of liberty.”
For different reasons, Franklin and Eleanor were inclined to share the general public’s desire to keep a distance from the violence in Europe. FDR, as a former undersecretary of the Navy and student of history, understood early that the United States would eventually be drawn into the conflict. He also knew, however, that the country was woefully unprepared and needed time to develop its armed forces and weaponry. What’s more, he was going to have to move slowly and carefully in persuading a resistant American public.
The middle years of FDR’s second term had been close to disastrous on several fronts. His Supreme Court initiative had failed miserably, and his attempt to balance the budget by cutting back on relief programs had proved to be a serious mistake. In the autumn of 1938, stock prices plunged and unemployment spiked, signaling the beginning of a second, “Roosevelt” depression. Roosevelt’s decision to campaign against conservative Democrats in the South also backfired: Republicans added many seats in Congress and eleven governorships in the midterm elections of 1938.
It wasn’t going to be easy for FDR, with all these domestic woes, to persuade the public to prepare for war. Yet in the fall of 1937 he had begun laying the groundwork, telling a Chicago audience that “the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading.”
Eleanor had been an advocate of world peace since her earliest days in politics. At a League of Nations convention in 1921, she had watched Carrie Chapman Catt argue passionately for the league. “Let us consecrate ourselves to put war out of the world,” Catt told the women that day. “It seems to me God is giving a call to the women of the world to come forward, to stay the hand of men, to say: ‘No, you shall no longer kill your fellow men!’”
Eleanor was “positively disgusted” by the bombing and destruction she watched on newsreels from Europe. “How can we be such fools as to go on senselessly taking human life in this way?” she asked rhetorically. “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.”
And yet it was she, not FDR, who wanted to send military aid to the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. Just months after the electoral victory of a left-leaning government in Spain, a Fascist army under General Francisco Franco sought to bring it down, with the blessing of the Catholic Church. Franco appealed for help to his natural allies, Mussolini and Hitler, who responded readily with infantry and air support. The elected government got almost no help from the countries that should have been allies, Russia and then-socialist France. As a result, Spain became a testing ground for Italian and German firepower, resulting in the devastating bombing of civilian populations—vividly depicted in Picasso’s painting of the obliteration of Guernica. Congress reacted to the war by updating the Neutrality Act so that no arms could be shipped to the defenders of the democratically elected Republic.
Eleanor was both frustrated and helpless. She believed in the Spanish Republican cause but couldn’t convince FDR to take a stand and risk alienating both the Catholics and the isolationists.
Thanks to the impassioned letters of their friend Martha Gellhorn, who was reporting from there, the war in Spain was vivid in the minds of both Eleanor and Hick. “I think of those people in Bilbao strafed by low-flying aeroplanes with machine guns,” Gellhorn wrote Eleanor in July 1937, “and think of thirty shells a minute landing in the streets of Madrid, it makes me sick with anger. Anger against two men whom I firmly believe to be dangerous criminals, Hitler and Mussolini, and against the international diplomacy which humbly begs for the continued ‘co-operation’ of the Fascists.”
Soon after, Martha Gellhorn paid a visit to Hyde Park at Eleanor’s invitation, accompanied by her “two trench buddies,” Ernest Hemingway and Joris Ivens, to screen the film the three had made about the war, The Spanish Earth. The film employs stark, lovingly edited black-and-white footage of a small Spanish village to tell a story of peasants working with their mules to irrigate their dry land and soldiers fighting to defend Madrid, using hopelessly antiquated armaments. The fight was still ongoing when The Spanish Earth was made. But no one watching it could doubt that these humble country people, fighting on their own, were doomed to fail. Gellhorn was pleased when FDR urged her to make the film even more forceful and Harry Hopkins seemed “very moved by it.” It didn’t change FDR’s position on the embargo, however.
In January 1938, more terrible news of the Spanish Civil War came to Hick from another quarter: Eddie Neil, a friend and fellow AP correspondent, died of shrapnel wounds, along with two other reporters, while covering the Franco forces on the front lines in Teruel. Neil was best known for his lively writing about boxing. There was a famous story about the first time he met Jack Dempsey: the boxer shook Neil’s hand, then punched him hard in the ribs. Neil punched back. The two clinched, fell to the ground, and rolled over and over. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
In the hospital after the explosion, Neil seemed to be responding to blood transfusions. “So long until tomorrow,” he told his visitor from the Times. “Tell my office I’m going to Paris as soon as I can and I’ll soon be all right again.” He died not long after from gangrene poisoning. He was thirty-seven years old, and left behind a wife and a small son he called “Champ.”
Hick and two of her newspaper friends mourned Eddie Neil’s death in a New York pub a few days later, drinking and talking until three in the morning. Eleanor, who had met Neil through Hick, celebrated him in her column. “I remember him as a charming, very much alive, human being.”
It was “a waste,” she wrote, “. . . for the sake of getting more colorful news, to send these men . . . into such positions of danger.” Hick appreciated Eleanor’s column, and so apparently did some of her friends at the AP, who pinned it to the board, with underlining. But Eddie Neil would not have agreed with the sentiment: he was willing to risk everything to get the news. Some days earlier, after he had sent a story over the wire to the AP, a bullet had whizzed by within inches of his head and lodged in the stone wall behind him. His only reaction was to say he was glad it happened after he had filed.
“It seems to me the world is almost too black to behold,” Gellhorn wrote Eleanor in February 1938. “Half of it is bullied and terrorized and debased by dictators and half of it is soppy with cowardice and sloth and selfishness.”
In March, Austria fell to Hitler. Only Dorothy Thompson, among American commentators, sounded a loud alarm, calling the annexation “the most cataclysmic event of modern history.” She predicted that “one of two things will happen: Germany will dominate the continent of Europe, or millions of lives will be spent in another war.”
By summer, Gellhorn was in Czechoslovakia, waiting for Hitler to make his next move. It felt, she wrote Eleanor, like “waiting in an operating room for the surgeon, who will come to work with a blunt knife and no anesthetic.”
September and November proved to be the cruelest months yet. In September, twelve thousand Jews with Polish passports living in Germany were forced to leave their homes without warning. Then, on September 29, 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French prime minister Édouard Daladier conceded the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in Munich, hoping to appease his monstrous appetite. Ten days later, on Kristallnacht, the “Night of the Broken Glass,” rioters in Berlin and Vienna destroyed Jewish shops and homes and torched fifteen hundred synagogues.
“War itself,” Gellhorn wrote Eleanor in December 1938, “war in the trenches between armed men, is of course bad enough, but it is a circus compared to the helpless Jews living in ditches between Czecho and Germany, and the helpless solitary man caught up in the ghastly machinery of the concentration camp, and the seven months old babies with rickets or TB in Barcelona.”
On March 15, 1939, Hitler took over the rest of Czechoslovakia. Frustrated with the inaction of Britain, France, and the United States, Gellhorn wrote Eleanor, “I do not believe that Fascism can destroy democracy, I think democracy can only destroy itself.”
On April 15, FDR made one last attempt at diplomacy. His message to Hitler listed thirty-one countries by name and asked for an assurance that neither Germany nor Italy would attack them for at least ten years.
Hitler responded by delivering what journalist William L. Shirer described as the most brilliant oration of his career, before a wildly enthusiastic crowd at the Reichstag. “For sheer eloquence, craftiness, irony, sarcasm and hypocrisy, it reached a new level that he was never to approach again,” Shirer wrote. Hitler heaped scorn on Roosevelt, pointing out that he himself had conquered chaos, created great new roads and built factories, and employed seven million, while Roosevelt was still struggling to overcome the Depression.
“Roosevelt put his chin out,” Republican senator and leading isolationist Hiram Johnson of California noted, “and he got a resounding whack on it.”
Three days later, on April 30, FDR opened the New York World’s Fair, declaring the country “united in a common purpose to work for the greatest good for the greatest number . . . and united in its desires to encourage peace and goodwill among all the nations of the world.”
It was not to be. Over the summer, as millions streamed through the gates of the World’s Fair and marveled at its wonders, the hope for peace and goodwill among nations faded away. In August, Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact. Poland, it was generally agreed, would be the next to fall. If that happened, the British and French would be forced to declare war.
On September 1, 1939, FDR was awakened at 3 a.m. by the U.S. ambassador in Paris, William Bullitt, with the news that “several German divisions are deep in Polish territory.”
“Well, Bill,” FDR replied, “it has come at last. God help us all.”
PART IV
THE WORLD AT WAR
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AFRAID NO MORE
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1939, was one of those precious sunny days at the
Little House—the kind of day that Hick would usually spend reading on her porch and walking with Prinz in the woods. Instead, she stayed inside, close to the radio, listening with Howard to the news from England.
At 12:45, King George VI addressed “every household of my peoples, both here and overseas” in a halting and gentle voice.
“For the second time in the lives of most of us,” he began, “we are at war.
“Over and over again,” he continued, “we have tried to find a peaceful way out of the differences between ourselves and those who are now our enemies, but it has been in vain.”
Hick and Howard “wept openly and without embarrassment.”
“What can one say?” she wrote Eleanor. “Nothing. I can’t even think very clearly. Just now one can only feel.” In a postscript, she added, “I find being an isolationist rather hard going today! And so does Howard!”
Eleanor was listening too, at Val-Kill, where only two and a half months earlier she had played hostess to the king and queen and reported her impressions to Hick. She had found the queen self-conscious, but “who wouldn’t be? Turning on graciousness like water is bound to affect one in time!” She had warmed to the king, though. “He is very nice and doesn’t stutter badly when speaking aloud and not at all in quiet conversation.”
On September 3, the king’s stuttering hesitations, coming at odd moments, seemed to add to the power of his address. Every word was hard-earned, just as the decision to go to war was hard-earned, and the quietness of his delivery was a welcome contrast to Hitler’s screaming invective. “There may be dark days ahead,” the king warned, “and war can no longer be confined to the battlefield, but we can only do the right as we see the right, and reverently commit our cause to God.”