by Susan Quinn
FDR’s speech that evening was careful for a different reason: he didn’t want to stir up isolationist and antiwar sentiment. “This nation,” he told his radio audience, “will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or close his conscience.” He ended with the promise that there would be “no blackout of peace in the United States.”
Eleanor, who was often critical of FDR’s speeches, found this one “restrained and wise.” Despite her sympathy for the Spanish Republican cause, she still hoped the United States could keep out of the war in Europe.
Increasingly, she focused on fear as the source of discord, at home and abroad. Fear became the subject of the most probing essays she was now providing for various journals—essays through which she defended her own alliance with putatively “Communist” youth groups and went on to argue for greater tolerance of differences of every kind.
The battle between those who feared Communism and those who feared Fascism was a misguided, negative battle, she argued. “We must not fight against something, but for something. We need not fear any ‘isms’ if our democracy is achieving the ends for which it was established.”
In the best of several essays on fear, Eleanor began with the painful childhood memory of the time she disappointed her father by refusing to ride down a steep trail in Italy on her donkey. It was then, she wrote, that she realized fear was something to be overcome. She was a timid child, “afraid of many things—afraid of the dark . . . afraid of being scolded, afraid that people would not like me.” It took time to realize that such fears “paralyzed growth.”
She argued that a “complex of national fears” had developed since 1929—fear of the CIO’s power, of Negroes “getting too ambitious,” of Jews whose “interests lie with international bankers,” of Communism, of Fascism. Fears of Communism and Fascism were “nothing more than lack of confidence in ourselves.” Fear underlay hyperpatriotism as well, and the “hysteria” about aliens and immigrants. Taken together, Eleanor’s essays became an extended elaboration of the great phrase from FDR’s first inaugural: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
“My dear,” Hick wrote Eleanor, “I’ve just read your article on ‘Fear’ and it is magnificent! Bravo! Again and again.” She went on, “I wonder if you realize how much better your stuff is . . . than it was three or four years ago. They are so much more interesting . . . they sound as though you had given them so much more careful thought.”
Hick suggested Eleanor go back, “just for the fun of it,” and look at some of her early writing, in 1932 and 1933, to compare it with her recent pieces. “You’ll be amazed, I think. And you’ll understand, too, I think, why I never used to be really satisfied with what you wrote those days—and why I am so darned pleased and so proud of you now.”
Perhaps the source of Eleanor’s new confidence and force of argument on the page was the showdown over Val-Kill, or the need to defend her alliance with the American Youth Congress, or her growing alarm over the rearmament that FDR was already undertaking. Whatever the reason, the “slight stiffening of the backbone” that Tommy had observed at the time of the Val-Kill affair seemed to be carrying over into not only her writing but also her actions.
That November, Eleanor attended the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, a mixed-race gathering in the segregated city of Birmingham, Alabama. On the first day of the meeting, blacks and whites intermingled freely in the audience. But the next morning the church was surrounded with Black Marias and police, who warned that anyone who broke segregation laws would go to jail. The delegates complied to avoid trouble: blacks sat on one side and whites on the other.
Eleanor arrived late that day with the WPA’s Aubrey Williams and AYC’s Mary McLeod Bethune (who was black) and slipped into the first seats they could find—on the “colored” side. Very quickly, Eleanor was reminded by a policeman that she would have to move. Eleanor’s reaction was to pick up her chair and place it in the aisle between the white and black sections. The weekly Afro-American took note of her gesture, commenting that “sometimes actions speak louder than words.”
Five months later, Eleanor was faced with yet another chance to act against racism, when the Daughters of the American Revolution barred Marian Anderson from Constitution Hall. One night in 1936, Anderson had sung for the Roosevelts, accompanied by her longtime partner, the Finnish pianist Kosti Vehanen. Vehanen, who had traveled the world with Anderson, noticed that she sang “with a special fire that night,” as she tended to do when she especially admired her audience. Anderson may not have known, and probably would not have cared, that she was the first African American singer to perform at the White House. She always insisted that she was not meant to be a fearless fighter, “just as I was not meant to be a soprano instead of a contralto.”
But in 1939, forces beyond her control swept Anderson up in a historic confrontation when the board of the DAR voted to deny her access to the only performance space in Washington suitable for an artist of her stature, Constitution Hall. The ladies of the DAR cited their “white artists only” policy as justification. NAACP president Walter White, already an ally of Eleanor’s on antilynching legislation, wrote to newspapers, rallied other musicians to protest, and announced that Eleanor Roosevelt would present the NAACP’s prestigious Spingarn Medal to Marian Anderson—all in an effort to shame the DAR into reversing its position.
Eleanor hoped for weeks that public pressure would bring the DAR around without her having to resign. But on February 27, 1939, she announced her decision in “My Day.” In the past, she explained, she might have “stayed and made a fight.” But this time, since she could “do no active work,” she had decided to submit her resignation.
The resignation letter, addressed to the DAR president, was written in Eleanor’s typical self-effacing style: “I am afraid I have never been a very useful member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, so I know it will make very little difference to you whether I resign,” she began. “. . . However I am in complete disagreement with the attitude taken in refusing Constitution Hall to a great artist.”
Of course, Eleanor’s resignation made all the difference. Hundreds of other DAR members followed her lead and resigned as well.
Walter White, along with Anderson’s manager, Sol Hurok, and other supporters of the cause, began to consider the possibility of defying the ban with an outdoor concert. Somehow the idea emerged—no one is sure who thought of it first—of a performance at the Lincoln Memorial, a novel venue at the time.
Anderson, meanwhile, watched from the sidelines with alarm. The “weight of the Washington affair bore in on me,” she later wrote. “I had become, whether I liked it or not, a symbol, representing my people.”
On Easter Sunday 1939, an audience of seventy-five thousand gathered on the National Mall, and many thousands more gathered by their radios all around the country, to hear Anderson sing. Harold Ickes made the introductory remarks. “In this great auditorium under the sky,” he began, “all of us are free. When God gave us this wonderful outdoors . . . he made no distinction of race, or creed or color.” Cheers cascaded back through the huge crowd, extending all the way to the towering Washington Monument at the other end of the Mall. The vast seated figure of Lincoln, “the great emancipator,” floated above the proceedings.
Anderson looked small, huddled in her caped fur coat under the great pillars of the memorial. She stood for an unusually long time in the expectant silence before she nodded to her pianist to play the introductory six bars of “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Later she would write that she “felt for a moment as though I were choking. For a desperate second I thought that the words, well as I know them, would not come.”
But the words did come. Surprisingly, and fittingly, she changed the usual “of thee I sing” to “
of thee we sing.” Her luscious contralto voice gained conviction and volume with each phrase. Anderson’s beautiful smooth face, which had looked worried when she began, broke out in a radiant smile as the crowd cheered and cheered.
Eleanor chose not to attend the event, probably because she did not want to draw attention away from Anderson. But the crowd in attendance knew the story: an aristocratic woman had dared to speak up against racism to her own kind, the ladies of the DAR. Some months later, Eleanor readily took a public stand once again, this time against Martin Dies and the House Committee on Un-American Activities—later called HUAC. For over a year, the committee had been using outrageously unfair tactics to go after organizations it considered Communist. The Federal Theatre Project, one of the worthiest of the WPA arts projects, had been virtually destroyed by accusations of Communism brought by the committee the previous year. Now, after the committee heard unreliable testimony from witnesses hostile to the American Youth Congress, it summoned on short notice the leaders themselves to defend their activities, including the World Youth Congress at Vassar the previous summer.
Eleanor happened to be in New York on November 30, 1939, when the leaders got the call. She agreed to meet them at Penn Station so that they could ride “the midnight” down to Washington together. For an hour, as the train made its way south, Eleanor and the excited young leaders huddled in one compartment and talked strategy. She advised them to be helpful, to volunteer information, to keep their hostile feelings under wraps. She suggested using her tried-and-true technique: get cooler as you get angrier. She promised, if she could get FDR’s approval, to come with them to the hearing. After that she left for her berth in the sleeper; her coconspirators sat up in coach, working on their statements for the committee.
The next morning, Eleanor appeared in the hearing room along with the young leaders. The committee was taken aback. Joe Starnes, an Alabaman with southern manners, asked her if she would like to sit up at the table with the congressmen.
Eleanor replied, “I came only to listen. I can hear very well from here.”
Not surprisingly, the proceedings remained bland and polite in her presence. “I think the Youth Congress people made a grand impression,” she wrote Hick proudly. “Their testimony was clear and carried conviction. The Committee oozed encouragement and confidence in them!”
At noon, Eleanor invited several of the congress’s leaders to ride over to the White House in her car for lunch. And that evening, she invited them back to stay overnight. She relished having “a house full of young people.”
On the second day, the committee heard testimony from an intense young activist named Joe Lash. Until then, Eleanor hadn’t taken particular notice of Lash. It was his slightly unsteady testimony that day that piqued her curiosity. When asked why the Student Union, which he represented, didn’t ban Communists, he didn’t deny that there were Communists in the organization, but said instead that “we have found it a good thing to discuss things with people you disagree with.” It wasn’t clear from his response whether he might be a Communist or former Communist himself.
“I had a feeling that your political opinions were not completely clarified,” Eleanor wrote Lash after the hearing. “If you ever feel that you would like to see me and talk things over, either in New York or here, I shall be glad to have you come either alone or bring anyone you want with you.”
Eleanor’s instincts were correct: Lash was struggling with several moral dilemmas, both political and personal. He had been sympathetic to Communism until Stalin made a deal with Hitler the previous summer; now he was disenchanted. But others in the student movement were secretly sticking to the party line. He had been unwilling to reveal this truth and betray his friends in front of the hateful Martin Dies. Lash was also unhappy in his marriage. It was in the process of trying to figure all this out, with Eleanor as concerned listener and faithful correspondent, that the friendship blossomed. Before long, Eleanor had not only learned Joe’s life story—he was the oldest of five born in New York to Russian Jewish immigrants—but also paid a visit to his mother at her grocery store. At thirty, Joe was young enough to be Eleanor’s son, and he was in many ways the son she wished she’d had. In a letter to Hick, she noted that Joe’s idealism, though admirable, was going to make it hard for him to earn a living. “My children could better afford the ideals and they are not touched by them.”
Eleanor never worked out her own views alone. There were always individuals she was strongly attracted to and learned from at the same time. Hick was one of the most important ones. After that fateful day at the Dies hearing, Joe Lash became another.
Hick, for whatever reasons, didn’t seem envious of Eleanor’s new relationship with young Joe. Perhaps it was because he was young, or because Eleanor’s relationships with men were not a direct threat. Or perhaps it was because she was deeply immersed in her own eventful life, which at that moment was careening even more than usual between great satisfaction and panic about the future.
Ever since she had met Eleanor and left the AP, Hick worried that her employers viewed her as the First Lady’s charity case—someone they had to hire because she was Eleanor’s friend. She worked harder, fearing this, and succeeded in winning the genuine admiration of her bosses—Harry Hopkins at WPA, and now Grover Whalen, the temperamental president of the World’s Fair.
There was a period, early on in her stint at the fair, when Hick headed off a clash of egos between Whalen and the highly vocal congressman from New York, Sol Bloom, who felt his proposals for the fair had been ignored. The resulting alliance produced a bill to fund the World’s Fair and word that “the whole World’s Fair organization [had] fallen in love” with her. Then came a time when Hick was so out of favor with Grover Whalen, for unknown reasons, that she expected to be fired.
By the time the fair opened, in the spring of 1939, Hick was back in favor in a big way: she had three secretaries working for her and a reputation in some quarters as a “human dynamo.” She credited Eleanor with teaching her how to be efficient on the job. “It amuses me, sometimes, how much I’ve copied from you.” She added, “If I’m a ‘human dynamo,’ my dear, how would one describe you?”
Hick had wooed thousands of New York City teachers and children to the fair. “Nickel Day,” overseen by Hick, attracted great crowds of fairgoers with its promise of five-cent admission. A poster contest for high school students—her idea—drew lots of media attention as well. For a time, she headed her department at the fair, and she was given a raise when others were being let go.
The ultimate proof that Hick’s status had changed came two weeks before the opening of the fair, when she got a summons from the boss. Whalen was in bed and seriously ill with pneumonia. For some reason, he wanted to see Hick, and his wife and nurse couldn’t talk him out of it. So Hick drove from Queens to his house in Greenwich Village to hear what he had to say. Whalen, in his feverish state, was worrying about opening day, and the possibility it might not be as outrageously over the top as he wanted it to be. Word was out that the U.S. naval fleet had been sent to the West Coast and wouldn’t be around for opening ceremonies.
“Obviously,” Hick wrote Eleanor, “there’s nothing I can do about the fleet, and I hope he understands that!” Mrs. Whalen was impressed nonetheless. “Grover has a great deal of confidence in you,” she told Hick. In the end, the Atlantic Fleet showed up. The hundreds of thousands in attendance were treated to the sight of twenty-eight men-of-war steaming into the harbor “with the white of the bow waves curling beneath their cutwaters.” Whalen rose from his sickbed and took part in the ceremonies, along with the president, the First Lady, the mayor of New York, the justices of the Supreme Court, the cabinet, governors from many states, and ministers and ambassadors from all over the globe.
The World’s Fair, like so many such extravaganzas, didn’t come close to making money and paying back investors. Whalen’s grand dream of peace among n
ations also faded quickly from view during that summer of 1939. Nonetheless, the World’s Fair board decided to keep the fair open for a second season. Hick could have stayed on: her boss—and friend—Howard A. Flanigan, a World War I Navy commander who was now a fair executive, told her there was a job for her at the fair as long as she wanted one.
The friendship of the man Hick called “the Commander” may have been the best thing that happened to her at the World’s Fair. The two of them consoled each other when they were in Grover’s “black book” and celebrated together when things were going well. The Commander once paid Hick an unlikely compliment: “You are a true aristocrat,” he told her, “in the best sense.
“You’d rather be the sort of person you are—even if you have to take it on the chin sometimes—than to be a rat.”
“It made me feel good,” Hick wrote Eleanor.
True friend that he was, the Commander called Hick into his office for a lecture as 1939 came to a close. He knew she was eager to find a new job and leave the fair, and also that she was doing almost nothing to make it happen.
First he wished her happy New Year. Then he proceeded to lecture her about her reclusive and counterproductive ways. First of all, she had skipped his Christmas cocktail party and had been unreachable, out at the Little House, when he tried to call her on Christmas Eve. Now he reproached her “at length” for “drawing into a hole” and “never seeing anyone.”
“You never do anything except sit around that apartment evenings and go off to the country to be with that damned dog of yours,” he said. This made Hick smile, but she knew he was right.
Hick was hoping to get a job, with Eleanor’s help, working for the Democratic National Committee, but the Commander pointed out that she would be wise to develop other connections. “How the hell do you think you’re ever going to get another job if you don’t make contacts and use the connections you have?” he asked. Then he accused her of once again letting Eleanor find a job for her, instead of going out to meet people and putting on cocktail parties.