From January to June, Congress passed only one piece of significant legislation: the Rearmament Act, a multimillion-dollar military appropriations bill. The rearmament program called for urgent air, sea, and land defenses; new heavy and light artillery; gas masks, flight training, and thousands of new airplanes. FDR achieved cross-sectional support for this legislation. ER supported the act, believing that a fortified nation is a protected nation.
Her friends in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, however, believed that weapons-building programs encouraged war and criticized her for it. ER explained that given the European situation, “I should think we would all of us realize that there are times when an adequate defense enables us to preserve a just peace,” while “an inadequate defense obliges one to accept injustices [and compels] future insecurity.”
Indeed, since the defeat of Spain’s democratically elected Loyalists and the abandonment of Czechoslovakia, an entirely new era had emerged, demanding entirely new responses. “Each American family must snap out of its secure little circle and face stirring problems at home and abroad,” she told an audience. “The price of keeping our personal liberty is that we shall have to think for ourselves. We are going to have to be willing to face many situations that we have never been willing to face before.”
Still, as she and FDR had consistently argued, rearmament represented only part of America’s defense needs. That spring of 1939 she was particularly dismayed by the stalled effort to democratize, and actually integrate racially, the Social Security Act of 1935—specifically, to include all the still-uncovered farmworkers, domestic workers, government workers, and employees of “private non-profit religious, charitable and educational institutions.” Indeed, all efforts to fortify New Deal programs concerning health, education, housing, and jobs were stalled in a climate of political acrimony, which included white supremacist bluster.
Americans had to be secure against the ravages of poverty, sickness, and old age. The Social Security Board itself had recommended increases in old-age benefits and a new “triangle tax to be borne equally by employer, employee and government”; that “federal grants for aid to dependent children be raised to the level of those for the aged and the blind”; and that unemployment coverage be extended. All spring, in her lectures and writings, ER supported these urgent recommendations.
While FDR increasingly concentrated on the international situation, ER attended to the nasty backlash against her husband and the New Deal. She specifically campaigned for Senator Robert Wagner’s public health bill, drafted after years of research with the involvement of her closest allies in the American Foundation led by Esther Lape. FDR agreed that “the health of the people is a public concern,” but little was done.
Wagner’s bill called for the restoration of the old Sheppard-Towner grants for maternal infant and child health services;* medical services for handicapped children; improved public health services nationwide, including federal grants to states for dental services; and construction of general, mental, and tuberculosis hospitals. The bill would ensure “all services and supplies necessary for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of illness and disability” state by state.
ER also worked vigorously for the Harrison-Thomas bill to provide federal aid for education—including grade and high schools, adult education, junior colleges, special education for the handicapped, rural library services—and for children “on federal reservations and at foreign stations.”
Above all, she championed Senator Wagner’s 1939 urban renewal bill, which sought to provide funds for slum clearance and low-rent housing construction. She saw it as an extension of her own work in the creation of Arthurdale, West Virginia, in 1934—now one of twenty-nine American communities administered by the Farm Security Administration. She considered the creation of affordable homes for America’s industrial and farmworkers among the New Deal’s greatest triumphs. Senator Wagner had a devoted supporter in ER when he said, “Of all the programs for the rehabilitation of our people and the development of our physical resources there is none which has a smaller effect upon the national debt and which yields a larger return in economic benefits and human welfare than the housing program.”
ER’s crusade for enhancing “the human side of government” was fueled by the unemployment crisis. Congress’s stingy attitude toward the WPA, especially toward its training and work, education, and arts programs, seemed horrifying when over ten million people were still unemployed. In one city alone, four thousand women applied for twelve civil service positions that paid a modest annual salary. In the face of such demonstrable need, ER wondered, how could elected leaders be so shortsighted and actually cruel?
She wanted to see public protests and organized community efforts. She wanted her husband to speak more bluntly to reactionaries in Congress and in his own party. But it was an election year, and FDR preferred his diplomatic approach, even as he warned: We will have a liberal democracy, or we will return to the Dark Ages.
She went across the country to defend the New Deal, and relentlessly agitated for greater support for those who were sliding deeper into financial crisis without work or adequate shelter. It was as if she no longer considered her own needs, suspending many of her own friendships and simple pleasures. One day after a lecture in Massachusetts, she and Tommy stopped in Connecticut for a flying visit of less than an hour with Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read. Tommy explained to Lape that the visit had necessarily been brief because “Thursday she spends all day with the South Americans!”
She was referring to the entourage of Nicaragua’s president, the dictator Anastasio Somoza, who arrived on 5 May. His controversial visits to Washington, New York (for the World’s Fair), and New Orleans were entirely financed by the U.S. government. American companies had long dominated Nicaragua’s economy—its banks, railroads, gold mines, mahogany forests, and plentiful stores of coffee and bananas.* FDR supported Somoza in the interests of the hemispheric alliance to resist Nazi incursions. FDR’s famous line “He is a son of bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch” became an even more urgent aspect of U.S. policy as Hitler’s emissaries swarmed Latin America and trade with Germany and Japan increased.
On the morning of 5 May, in Washington’s spring heat, ER watched U.S. troops pay homage to the Franco of Nicaragua. A dutiful first lady, she accepted a medal from him and stood beside him during the military parade and reception. In a published photo of her, wearing a white fox around her neck, her expression of distress and distaste recalls her cold “Griselda moods” of silent rage. She hewed to her obligations as first lady, even when her personal beliefs were at odds with administration policy.
The Nicaraguan dictator left the capital with a $2.5 million loan from the Export-Import Bank and promises of more. There is no record of what FDR requested in return from the ruler of the most underpopulated nation in the western hemisphere, who had specifically refused to accept refugees (especially merchants and intellectuals) at the 1938 Evian Conference. On his return to Managua, Somoza renamed the main street “Avenida Roosevelt,” removed a “composite picture of himself and Adolf Hitler” from his office wall, and replaced it with “four portraits of FDR.” Clearly U.S. support countermanded German inroads.
• • •
All spring ER continued to be dismayed by FDR’s failure to respond to the mounting refugee crises. On 1 April she wired him from Seattle, where she was visiting their daughter Anna: “Just received wire signed Einstein, Dorothy Thompson, etc., about important leaders trapped in Madrid. Are you or State Department doing anything? All well here. Love.” FDR telegraphed back the same day from Warm Springs, “State Department doing everything possible in Spain. . . . Much love to all six of you.”
ER knew better. The State Department was doing nothing for refugees. In February, her old friend Nan Wood Honeyman, former member of Congress from Oregon, had appealed to her on behalf of a constituent for advice about where to turn for help with Jewish refugees. “The truth is,” ER had replied, “most of the work being done for refugees is being done through the Quakers and the Jewish Refugee Committee.” She suggested that Honeyman’s constituent contact Clarence Pickett of the AFSC. Her own work for refugees was done through those groups, notably the current campaign to provide sanctuary for children.
Meanwhile the House passed a bill that would actually require the “detention of certain aliens” pending their deportation. Introduced by Congressman Sam Hobbs (D-AL), it targeted refugees without papers—notably those from countries recently absorbed into Hitler’s Reich. Unable to obtain passports, they were now suspect and were to be detained for unspecified duration, without charges or hearings, despite all due process requirements of American law and custom.
ER’s closest friends and allies spoke vigorously against the bill, which they believed was unconstitutional, un-American, and totalitarian. In the debate on the House floor, Caroline O’Day invoked Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, in which “the United States, the greatest democracy in the world, became a totalitarian state, not overnight or all of a sudden . . . but because its citizens neglected to guard their civil liberties. Through carelessness or indifference they relinquished those liberties one by one until such time as a ruthless minority seized the reins of government and established a totalitarian state.” O’Day compared the current political situation to Lewis’s fictional state, and argued:
It can happen here. And if this bill becomes law we will have taken the first step. . . . [This bill] is a negation of every idea and policy and principle that our country holds most dear. I can imagine with what satisfaction Hitler will learn that his emissaries in this country have so influenced Congress that it is following his example and setting up detention or concentration camps during peacetime. . . . They are called detention camps, but Hitler knows as well as anyone how swiftly a detention camp can be transformed into a concentration camp. This bill is a vicious and un-American bill and should be defeated.
Supporters of the bill argued that it specifically targeted Communists, anarchists, and immoral agitators. “The American people do not want these . . . promoters of communistic philosophy creating disturbances and trouble in this country. Our people want to send them back from whence they came.”
Despite opposition by congressional leaders Emanuel Celler, Jerry Voorhis, and Louis Ludlow, the House passed the Hobbs bill on 5 May 1939, by 289 to 61, with 80 not voting.*
• • •
FDR was concerned about the plight of refugees, but he simply had too little congressional support even for his favorite projects. When he sought, for example, to make the CCC a permanent agency, Congress voted against it. He wanted to put things off until after the 1940 elections, which promised a more liberal outcome. In the meantime he sought alternative solutions for the refugee crises. ER had letters from people who had suggested underpopulated states, like Montana and Utah, as potential havens. When she sought her friend Bernard Baruch’s advice, he was uninterested and wanted to avoid exacerbating the “Jewish problem” in America.
When Baruch commended FDR for his 14 April letter to Hitler, the president cabled his gratitude, and noted, “The big thing we talked about is by no means dead. It will revive if Hitler and Mussolini do not slam the door in our faces!”
The “big thing” was Baruch’s plan for the creation of a United States of Africa for all refugees—for people “of all faiths and nationalities whom Hitler had marked for destruction.” He envisioned locating the colony in the Belgian Congo, Portuguese Angola, Kenya, and Tanganyika. Baruch saw it as a democratic and diverse alternative to a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine, which he feared could only become an embattled ghetto. Baruch intended to raise $500 million to create the sanctuary. He imagined that it would become a British protectorate and thereby would obtain British support. He enlisted Herbert Hoover to accept “leadership” for the engineering and technical aspects of the project, and he approached FDR, who “sketched a map of Africa . . . outlining the temperate, largely unpopulated areas where such a scheme might be put into effect.” Evidently FDR also sent emissaries to discuss the project with Hitler. But King Leopold had rebuffed the idea “because the land belonged to the natives.” “You see,” Baruch told the king, “no one wants them.”
Unlike Baruch, FDR believed that Britain’s promise to Jews regarding Palestine, initiated by the 1917 Balfour Declaration, represented a hopeful strategy for escape and haven.* He was dismayed in May 1933 when the United Kingdom issued a new White Paper that asserted that Palestine should not “be converted into a Jewish state against the will of the Arab population” and that severely restricted Jewish immigration to 75,000 over the next five years, never to exceed one-third of the total population. On 17 May FDR wrote to Cordell Hull that this policy change betrayed England’s pledge to create a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” Hull agreed—the United States would not officially recognize this shift in British policy.
Frustrated by a lack of progress on issues that concerned her deeply, ER confided to Hick on 20 May, “I have been admonishing FDR like a Dutch Uncle lately and he’s been good about it but I can’t bear to have Congress go home with nothing done!” She was also frankly disappointed by his recent speech regarding the arms embargo: “It doesn’t seem much good to me, same old thing and no real suggestions for what should be done and these are things that must be done. Well, it is easy to criticize when you don’t carry the responsibility.”
• • •
That was the strained political dimension in which the White House prepared for the unprecedented visit of Britain’s King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. In the battle against isolationist sentiment, the first lady increasingly considered her primary public relations activity to be hosting ceremonial receptions for heads of state who visited America for alliance and support. She and FDR believed that their honored guests could personify and humanize Europe’s tragedy, perhaps inducing isolationists to join their defense team.
No diplomatic visit received as much thoughtful attention to detail, time, and effort as did the heralded journey by Britain’s royals. With their own quest for alliances against fascism paramount, the king and queen had planned to journey to Canada to encourage the support of “every citizen in their dominions.” FDR invited them to the United States because he believed, as ER put it, “we all might soon be engaged in a life and death struggle, in which Great Britain would be our first line of defense.” For all the isolationist feeling in the United States, Americans shared a bond of language, custom, and ideals with the British. Both ER and FDR hoped the royal visit would spark concern among Americans and even stir a sense of unity with the British—especially among those stubbornly removed from the international situation.
When ER returned from her southern lecture tour on 31 May, she walked into a maelstrom of tension between FDR and his mother over room arrangements for the royals. Sara had been a guest of King George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace. Now their son was to visit her son, and the first mother wanted lofty standards fully observed. But FDR rejected stiff formalities. He behaved, ER later recalled, “as though we were simply going to have two very nice young people to stay with us. I think he gave some of the protocol people, both in the State Department and in the entourage of the king and queen, some very difficult moments.” The president and his mother had argued for days, until FDR took to his bed. ER wrote to Anna, “Pa was annoyed every minute and developed sinus Tuesday & went to bed with a temperature of 101/2 tonight. . . . I say a little prayer to live through the 11th,” when the royal visit was scheduled to end.
For her part, ER was determined to create an environment of warm gracious comfort and to fulfill her mother-in-law’s formal expectations. She consulted with the State Department’s chief of protocol, her knowledgeable social secretary Edith Helm, and her girlhood friend Elisabeth Cameron Lindsay, now Lady Lindsay, wife of the British ambassador Sir Ronald Lindsay. Daughter of Henry Adams’s great friend Elizabeth Cameron, Lady Lindsay had been a member of ER’s flamboyant biweekly “air our minds” luncheons during FDR’s first term. She was trustworthy, had a grand “sense of humor,” was “keen” and occasionally wicked. We “looked at things from more or less the same point of view,” ER wrote.
Some people believed SDR and her son disagreed about ER’s plans for the White House entertainment, but the family agreed on issues of race and justice—civility, opportunity, dignity for all—and that “we should give the king and queen something they would not have at home.” ER made it clear that Marian Anderson would indeed “be presented to the King and Queen of England.” That meant they would shake hands, and perhaps dine together. It was all unprecedented and, for some reporters at her regular press conference, “shocking.” The program would also feature baritone Lawrence Tibbett and the popular singer Kate Smith. Alan Lomax would perform western cowboy songs. There would also be a “North Carolina Negro chorus” of thirty men and women from the Federal Music Project; the Coon Creek Girls, a “white non-WPA” group from the Kentucky mountains; several square dance and folk dance groups.
ER also wanted to emphasize to the press that there were more important issues to discuss than “etiquette” and new mattresses for the White House. The real issue before America, and the world, she declared, was the survival of democracy, which depended on “freedom and security.” Freedom involved opportunity and work, education and gainful employment. Security involved the quest for peace. War now threatened democracy’s very survival.
That was the urgency behind the royal visit, as well as ER’s commitment to create positive newsworthy events that would transform public opinion. The press and most popular magazines anticipated the royal visit for weeks. ER appeared on the cover of Life magazine, as the “Queen’s Hostess.” The cover article featured the royal stay at Hyde Park, with extraordinary photographs by Margaret Bourke-White. Every room the royals might enter was accounted for and assessed: “Hyde Park is no castle but it is one of America’s most charming homes. . . . It is an old shoe of a place—worn, scuffed and scratched, polished into shape. . . . It is most emphatically American because its owner cared nothing about having a fancy house to show off and a great deal about a good house to live in.” ER was pleased that FDR insisted no changes would be made: the king and queen would see Hyde Park as it always was. They would enter a hall that featured prints of American victory over “British men of war” during the naval battles of 1812.
Despite her harried schedule, ER had agreed to an extraordinary interview and portrait session with S. J. Woolf of the New York Times. Woolf was treated to the fullness of one ER White House afternoon. ER gave Woolf only one hour to sketch her portrait and less than thirty minutes for questions. At three-thirty Tommy arrived to take dictation for ER’s column, while Woolf sketched. She allowed him to sit in as she dictated her column to Tommy. The result was the deepest glimpse into the heart of the first lady published to date. He had intended to focus on the royal visit but was so impressed by ER’s hectic life and contagious enthusiasm that he celebrated her “energy” instead. “All formality was forgotten,” Woolf wrote, “as this tall, lithe woman with a gracious smile entered . . . with [her] air of naturalness and hospitality which converted a cold public building into a home.”
ER’s “astonishing energy and absorbing curiosity,” Woolf learned, were fueled by her love for people. Her work satisfied her, helping people pleased her, and she never worried about making mistakes. She credited her splendid staff for doing much of the work for which she was complimented. She received, for example, 90,000 to 300,000 letters a year—her secretary of seventeen years, Tommy Thompson, and a team of assistants were responsible for sorting her mail. ER was particularly interested in reading critical letters, many of which taught her things she needed to know, and letters that appealed for help, most of which were sincere.
ER was moved by the story of a very poor young girl with a spinal injury, for whom she arranged hospital care. ER became close to the girl and her family. She was cured and now “is happily married living a normal life.”* The encounter was a perfect illustration of her belief that communal prosperity was fully realized when disadvantaged individuals triumphed: “Every time some one rises above what appears to be an insurmountable difficulty and wins out I feel that we all ought to profit by it. If they can win, we can all win.”
That, ER noted, was the message of Arthurdale. In that small West Virginia community, “people have the opportunity to make homes and livings for themselves.” Although government support for the community continued to be criticized as wasteful and foolish, ER asserted that every penny was well spent “if it brings some happiness to those who need it, some security where before the future held nothing but terror.”
At four o’clock, ER rushed out to change into a “pink afternoon gown” to greet three hundred waiting people. Tommy confided to Woolf that in all her years with ER, “she was always the same, never ruffled, never angry, always understanding.” Then ER returned to finish dictating her column. Then another change, another reception, this time for four hundred people. Woolf completed his drawing and departed—refreshed and energized.
• • •
The day the royals left for North America, 8 May 1939, the radio press dispatches FDR received dramatically detailed the urgency of fortifying Anglo-American alliance:
Milan: Germany and Italy “converted the Rome-Berlin Axis into an outright military alliance.”
Moscow: Speculation was reported “on the possibilities of German-Soviet friendship resulting from the resignation of Maxim Litvinov.”
Madrid: “A flotilla of German warships” cruised Spain’s coast “in honor of general Francisco Franco and the Fuehrer Adolf Hitler to mark the victory of the nationalists in the civil war.”
Berlin: Germany asserted the Italo-German military alliance “is a destroying blow to an aggressive encirclement policy. . . . Statements [about the pact] were coupled with a blunt warning to Poland that she must shoulder full blame for all that is coming.”
London: The Archbishop of Canterbury appealed to Pope Pius XII “to assume leadership of a united front of ‘all Christendom’ to work for world peace.”
Capetown, South Africa: The German South African Party—“comprised of naturalized German ex-servicemen”—opposed Adolf Hitler, rejected Nazi philosophy, asked “South Africans to remember the pre-Hitler Germany where ‘right and justice were the supreme law.’”
At sea: The Empress of Australia, “this big passenger liner,” served “temporarily” as the royal yacht for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth “on their way to become the first British ruling couple ever to visit Canada and the United States.”
The king and queen arrived in Quebec on 17 May and spent eighteen days journeying across Canada.
On 4 June, as they prepared to travel to the United States, the Hamburg–American liner SS St. Louis, with 936 Jewish refugees aboard, was anchored “in the tropic heat” of Havana’s harbor. Although the refugees had purchased their visas from Cuban consuls in Germany, President Federico Laredo Brú, who had previously welcomed five thousand refugees, now required additional payment and new papers for asylum seekers. He ordered the ship to return to Hamburg. Captain Gustav Schröder announced that there had already been two suicide attempts, and he feared a “collective suicide pact.” Forced to leave Cuban waters, Captain Schröder slowly sailed up and down the U.S. coast, while urgent efforts for sanctuary were pursued.
That same week ER absorbed press reports of an American fascist movement revealed by the testimony of retired major general George Van Horn Moseley before Martin Dies’s House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities. Dies insisted that Communist interest groups, Communist “transmission belts,” and Communist fronts were everywhere, especially within New Deal agencies. Dies demanded “sterilization for refugees admitted to the United States” and called for “vigilante groups” to battle a “Jewish-led Communist revolution being plotted” by FDR and his friends. Despite calls for the Dies Committee to investigate Moseley and his ties to world fascism, Dies rejected them and announced instead his intention to focus on the arts and theater efforts of the WPA, youth and labor organizers in general, and ER’s friends and allies.
The only really good news of the week was the opening of the Czecho-Slovak Pavilion in Exile at the World’s Fair, which ER was moved to attend. The stirring speech by former president Edvard Beneš was broadcast nationwide and carried by short-wave radio to Europe. The flag of the conquered dissolved republic flew at half-mast, a promise of restored self-rule.
After leaving the World’s Fair, ER returned to her Greenwich Village apartment alone, to find the telephone ringing. Her youngest son, John, was calling with the news that his wife, Anne, was in distress, and they feared a miscarriage. Immediately ER dashed uptown to catch the night train to Boston. Anne Clark Roosevelt did lose her baby. But ER was certain the couple would recover and be strengthened by their ordeal. “Like all other disappointments and sorrows, it will probably make them more conscious that, in the real things in life, everyone stands on the same level and God sends us disciplines in order that we may better understand the sufferings of other people.” Their situation recalled her own lost baby who died at seven months. According to Mollie Somerville, a White House assistant, ER never stopped “mourning the loss of her second child. . . . She once told me, ‘The child you have carried under your heart, you will always carry in your heart.’”
ER returned to Washington with only two days to finish preparations for the arrival of the king and queen. She sought to put the entire nation at ease. So many people asked her how to greet their majesties, she recounted the story of a Yosemite park ranger who guided “King Albert and the Queen of the Belgians” through the park shortly after World War I. He had been “carefully coached . . . as to the proper way of addressing royalty.” But when they met, he forgot the rules, and as he told ER, “I just said ‘Howdy King’ and held out my hand.” Since they “were a charming royal couple,” ER was certain that would be good enough for them. She wanted the country to relax and enjoy the royal visit, she told the press.
The next morning, 7 June, she held her regular press conference. In the afternoon she was scheduled to speak to the Workers’ Alliance, the WPA union vilified as Communist by congressional opponents of the New Deal.
Almost every hour was scheduled. There was to be a diplomatic reception as soon as the king and queen stepped off the train in Washington; then luncheon; then a small tea for about twenty prominent New Dealers, in addition to children and several of ER’s ten grandchildren; then the formal state dinner and a musicale. ER assured the press that all guests at the musicale would be presented to the king and queen. After visiting Washington, the royals were to go to New York City, the World’s Fair, and on to Hyde Park. “If you want a press conference at Hyde Park,” ER told reporters, “I’ll arrange to have one.”
ER arrived at the national congress of the Workers’ Alliance at twelve-thirty. Her twenty-minute “extemporaneous” talk was front-page news. “Delegates from all parts of the country stamped and cheered their approval” as the first lady spoke. They might differ on some things, ER said, “but I am certainly in sympathy with the meeting of any group of people who come together to consider their own problems” and work to achieve betterment. She did not fear radicalism among young people as much as she feared the “rut of hopelessness.”
After her address, the Workers’ Alliance gave her honorary membership, and she “left the platform with her arms full of flowers presented to “the greatest lady in the world.” In that climate of rancor and division, politics and hope, she readied to greet the royals.
Once their train crossed the border at Niagara Falls into the United States, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were greeted everywhere by huge cheering crowds. Accompanied by Canada’s prime minister Mackenzie King and an entourage of numerous attendants, the king and queen arrived at Washington’s Union Station on Thursday, 8 June. FDR said, “At last I greet you.” After the long formal welcome, the two couples were surrounded by over 600,000 people who had turned out to cheer their slow drive to the White House. “It was a gay and happy crowd in spite of the sun and [94 degree] heat,” ER wrote. “Their Majesties themselves made such a gracious impression . . . you could feel the enthusiasm growing.”
ER was pleased because the public’s reaction, despite all her efforts, had hitherto remained uncertain. Anna reported from Seattle, “According to press stories the King and Queen have been worried stiff as to whether the U.S. would give them a cheering welcome or one mingled with boos. I can well imagine that all of those who had anything to do with the preparations will be terribly near collapse.” Vastly relieved, ER acknowledged the success of her publicity campaign.
Pageantry surrounded their arrival and the procession to the White House, which FDR enjoyed immensely. In support of the International Wool Growers of Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and the United States, who had “combined” to promote their industry, ER and the queen were to wear matching fabrics. “I took it off as soon as I could,” she later wrote. “The Queen could not bear to wear hers . . . for she was already suffering from the unusual heat.” The queen sat upon a cushion “which I afterwards discovered had springs to make it easier for her to keep up the continual bowing.”
ER’s sons James (Jimmy), Elliott, and Franklin and their wives were part of the weekend. John and Anne remained in Boston; Anna and her family were in Seattle. “Luncheon was a very quiet meal with just the guests in the house and our own family, and for once my boys were subdued to such a degree that the President noticed it and remarked to the Queen that it was rare when something did not bring about a vociferous argument in our family.”
That afternoon there was a drive around the city to see the Lincoln Memorial, the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, and Rock Creek Park. ER and Queen Elizabeth used the time to speak intimately and undisturbed. ER was relieved to learn that they agreed about major issues: the “Queen endeared herself to me by saying suddenly, ‘I saw in the paper that you were being attacked for having gone to a meeting of the WPA workers. It surprises me that there should be any criticism, for it is so much better to allow people with grievances to air them; and it is particularly valuable if they can do so to someone in whom they feel a sense of sympathy and who may be able to reach the head of the government with their grievances.’”
Their long walks and many talks engendered in ER a deep respect for her new friend:
It was interesting to me to find how understanding and sympathetic was the Queen’s attitude toward the social problems faced today by every one. It is quite evident that no nation is without these problems and that their solution is of world-wide interest. These sovereigns are young [fifteen years younger than the Roosevelts], and though the weight of responsibility matures people early, still one does not always find in sovereigns such ability or even desire to comprehend the problems which confront so many people in every country today, and which must be solved before we can feel that the average man and woman can have security and liberty.
Thursday evening was the state dinner at the White House. There were “a few harrowing moments,” ER acknowledged years later. The receiving line was slowed down because at one point the queen felt faint from the heat and exertion of the day. Then the program was rearranged at the last minute to let Kate Smith sing first so she would not be late for her radio broadcast. Marian Anderson hesitated to sing Negro spirituals, “but we discovered it in time to persuade her [our guests] from England would want to hear the music that above all else we could call our own.” An anonymous tipster wrote the FBI that the musicologist Alan Lomax, who was to sing country and cowboy songs, was “a communist or bolshevik and likely to do something dangerous.” So Lomax was “frisked” by both the Secret Service and Scotland Yard and “apparently was so frightened he could hardly sing.”
Before she went to bed that night, ER wrote Hick a short note: “Well, one day is over and fairly well over. The Queen reminds me of Queen Victoria! He is very nice and doesn’t stutter badly when speaking aloud and not at all in quiet conversation. The entertainment went very well tonight, I think, and Marian Anderson was divine.” But the heat was “oppressive,” and ER was “weary.”
The next morning ER told her press conference, “The Queen seems to be particularly interested in social conditions. For one so young she is extremely compassionate and understanding of the conditions that push people to desperation,” and the queen was personally kind. When seven-year-old Diana Hopkins, Harry Hopkins’s young daughter who was then living at the White House, expressed a desire to meet the “fairy queen” with “crown and scepter,” a special meeting was arranged before dinner at the British embassy—with, ER said, “true understanding [for] the child.”
Their majesties had agreed to meet the women of ER’s press conference. The journalists made a double line in the corridor, and ER presented them. According to Bess Furman, Queen Elizabeth, regal in white, said only, “‘There are a lot of them, aren’t there?’” The king merely smiled “as he ran the feminine gauntlet.”
The oppressive heat continued as the Roosevelts and the royals boarded the presidential yacht Potomac for a luncheon cruise to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home, where the king laid a wreath on the first president’s tomb. In the afternoon, they toured a Civilian Conservation Corps camp and visited Arlington National Cemetery, where they placed wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and at the Canadian Cross. As they stood contemplating past and future wars, taps was played. “I was not the only one who stood with a lump in my throat,” ER wrote. “Arlington was the unforgettable moment of the whole day.”
The royals’ Washington visit climaxed with a gala dinner at the British embassy, after which they boarded their train for New York City, and the Roosevelts took another train to Hyde Park. The two couples would rendezvous late on Saturday at the Roosevelt home. ER dashed off a brief report to Hick: “Dearest, This day . . . has gone well, even FDR is content and I am glad for him.” There was good, substantial, and wide-ranging conversation at dinner, and the king told ER that “he felt he had learned a great deal.” The queen was interested in every issue, and ER “was fascinated by the Queen, who never had a crease in her dress or a hair out of place.” She was unhurried and emotionally unruffled no matter the circumstance. “I do not see how it is possible to remain so perfectly in character all the time. My admiration for her grew every minute she spent with us.”
Jane Ickes described Washington events in more detail to Anna: “You know, Anna, this city stinks (I promised Harold that I would never more use that vulgar term, but it is the only one which adequately expresses my indignation). . . . Such hate, greed, envy, knifing, pettiness.” For Jane, ER and FDR were really the story: “Anna, how lucky America is to have as hosts your mother and father. . . . They are so much more regal than royalty. . . . Really Anna, [Harold and I] just stared and felt ourselves swelling with pride and thankfulness.”
The first couple arrived at Hyde Park shortly after nine in the morning and had the day to prepare for a most extraordinary twenty-four hours. This was for FDR the highlight of the visit: “My husband always loved taking people he liked home with him. I think he felt he knew them better once they had been to Hyde Park.” ER was mostly pleased by the arrangements. She brought the White House staff along and butlers she trusted. Because they were African-American, however, SDR’s English butler left. There is no record of what SDR thought about his impertinence, or the fact that he would not be there to advise the White House staff about the specific vagaries of the house. When SDR’s butler “heard that the White House butlers were coming up to help him,” ER later recalled, “he was so shocked that the King and Queen were to be waited on by colored people that he decided to take his holiday . . . in order not to see [their majesties] treated in that manner!”
Meanwhile the king and queen arrived in New York to be greeted by three million cheering people. Governor Herbert Lehman and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia led a motorcade of fifty cars from Manhattan to the fairgrounds in Queens. A grand fireworks reception was held at the British pavilion. The Magna Carta, the great charter of personal and political liberty obtained from King John in 1215, was on display, alongside George Washington’s family tree. Washington was not only descended from several signers of the Magna Carta; he was also directly related to the queen. Indeed, according to genealogists, Queen Elizabeth was also a distant cousin of Robert E. Lee. Much was made about shared Anglo-American culture, heritage, and democratic traditions.
After the World’s Fair, the royal couple traveled back to Manhattan to be received by Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia University, which had been chartered as “King’s College” by George II in 1754. The royals were by then running behind schedule, but en route upstate they called the Roosevelts to report their whereabouts. According to ER, “We sat in the library . . . waiting for them. Franklin had a tray of cocktails ready in front of him, and his mother sat on the other side of the fireplace looking disapprovingly at the cocktails and telling her son that the King would prefer tea. My husband, who could be as obstinate as his mother, kept his tray in readiness.” When the royals finally arrived, FDR said, “My mother does not approve of cocktails and thinks you should have a cup of tea.” The king replied, “Neither does my mother,” and took a cocktail.
After everyone was relaxed, changed, and settled, the dinner guests arrived. Almost thirty people—local friends, neighbors, family, and Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King, who continued to accompany the royals—attended the formal dinner. But there was “a jinx” on the evening, ER wrote in her column. “Just exactly what happened to our well-trained White House butlers that night, I shall never know.” Tommy reported the mishaps to Esther Lape: “I must tell you first that the City of Limoges gave the President a very complete set of really beautiful china—with his crest, etc. He sent it to his mother because she did not have enough sets for such big dinners. . . . The butlers, during dinner, were piling up the service for the next course when the table they used collapsed. Mrs. R. said the racket was terrifying. All the dishes were smashed into bits.” ER noted, “Mama tried in the best-bred tradition to ignore it, but her step daughter-in-law [Helen Astor Roosevelt], from whom she had borrowed some plates for the occasion, was heard to say, ‘I hope none of my dishes were among those broken.’” ER noted that the broken dishes were all “part of a set my husband had been given; none of the old family china suffered.”
Since SDR’s butler had decamped without warning anyone about the unexpected steps between the kitchen and service areas, mishaps continued. After dinner, a butler slipped as he entered the library with a tray of glasses, brandy, soda, water, bowls of ice, and so on. He “fell down the two steps leading from the hall and slid right into the library,” ER recalled, smashing everything on the tray and “leaving a large lake of water and ice cubes at the bottom of the steps. I am sure Mama wished that her English butler had stayed.” ER wrote about it in her column, “because I thought it was really funny, but my mother-in-law was very indignant with me for telling the world about it and not keeping it a deep, dark family secret.” But at each upset “their Majesties remained completely calm and undisturbed,” which she interpreted as a sign of tranquillity and hope in a fractious world.
After dinner, which ended late, everyone retired—except the king and FDR, who spoke together for hours. The next day Mackenzie King told FDR that after their talk the king knocked on his door to chat. He asked, “Why don’t my ministers talk to me as the president did tonight? I felt exactly as though a father were giving me his most careful and wise advice.” FDR encouraged the young king, who had never wanted to be king, to be bold, to take charge, to speak out, and to reassure his people.
On Sunday, 12 June, before the household left for church, a butler at breakfast “fell with a whole tray of eggs, dishes, etc.” But the church service was moving and memorable, and all Hyde Park lined the roads to greet the royals. FDR, who had personally prepared the guest list and seating arrangements, subsequently wrote New York’s Episcopal bishop Henry St. George Tucker, “I think the service was perfect in every way,” and the king and queen were interested to learn that it was “substantially the same” as services in the Church of England. “I think last Sunday will always be remembered by them as the only quiet family day of their entire trip.”
Back at the Big House, ER reported, everyone rushed to change into their “picnic clothes” for the most famous hot dog picnic in American history. The queen telephoned her two young daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, at Buckingham Palace, who were “much amused” that she was to go to lunch while they were ready for bed. In addition to the hot dogs, which were to cook on “an outdoor fireplace,” there was “smoked turkey, which Their Majesties had not tasted before, several kinds of ham cured in different ways . . . salads, baked beans, and strawberry shortcake with strawberries from Henry Morgenthau’s farm.” The program introduced Native American artists to the king and queen, including Ish-Ti-Opi, “a quite remarkable actor and singer,” and Princess Te-Ata, “a real princess from an Oklahoma tribe, I knew well.” The stage was built around old-growth trees FDR was so proud of, “and the setting was quite perfect for the Indian songs and legends.”*
After the picnic the royals were invited to relax around the pool under the shade trees at ER’s cottage. The president and the king swam, but ER and her guests sat with the queen and “looked on.” ER “discovered” that a queen “cannot run the risk of looking disheveled,” and evidently ER, who always swam, could not persuade her to enjoy the moment.
After a quiet dinner at the Big House on their last evening, the royals, FDR, and ER left for Hyde Park Station. A crowd of more than a thousand people greeted the procession of cars despite “a very heavy thunderstorm” that had come through earlier. The king said, “It’s been a long week-end, but a short visit.” As the royals waved from the rear platform of the train, FDR shouted, “Good luck to you! All the luck in the world!”
As they departed, “the people who were gathered everywhere on the banks of the Hudson and up on the rocks suddenly began to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne.’” ER later wrote: “There was something incredibly moving about this scene—the river in the evening light, the voices of the many people . . . the train slowly pulling out with the young couple waving good-bye.” Then “we stood and waved, but my mother-in-law reminded us of the old superstition that one must not watch people out of sight, so before they turned the bend, we were back in our cars.”
ER “thought of the clouds that hung over them and the worries they were going to face . . . and left the scene with a heavy heart.”
Britain prepared a “monster welcome” for the royal return. The New York Times monitored British enthusiasm for the demonstrable good and many successes of the king and queen and the goodwill they had inspired. Much was made of the king’s new self-confidence and his robust and relaxed manner. With gratitude for what the royals had achieved, Harold Nicolson described their reception at Parliament Square:
Such fun yesterday. . . . The bells of St Margaret’s began to swing into welcome and the procession started. . . . There were the King and Queen and the two princesses. We lost all our dignity and yelled and yelled. The King wore a happy schoolboy grin. The Queen was superb. She really does manage to convey to each individual in the crowd that he or she have had a personal greeting. . . . We returned to the House with lumps in our throats.
As ER reflected on her time with the king and queen in terms of “the changed conditions which we are facing all over the world,” she was relieved that “this country will have a kindlier feeling toward the English nation. . . . May it bring us peace for many years to come.” She reported to Hick, “FDR was satisfied and all went well. I liked them both but what a life! They are happy together however and that must make a difference even in the life they have to lead.” Mackenzie King was “jubilant over the whole trip. I should think it might give Hitler and Mussolini food for thought.” The king and queen “undoubtedly made friends.”
ER wrote nothing about the big question of the picnic: did the queen in fact eat an American hot dog? Stories abounded. The fullest description was in Assistant Attorney General Norman Littell’s letter to Anna. Littell and his wife, Katherine, were among Anna’s closest friends. He and a group of subcabinet liberals met with FDR to consider strategy for 1940. As conversation “drifted” to the royal visit, he repeated FDR’s account. When offered her first hot dog, the queen had said, oh no, she could not possibly, her mouth was too small. According to FDR, she tried, but her mouth really was too small. He explained, you just push it in and chew, and she “tried hard but simply could not get around the hot-dog and bun and had to put it down and cut up the famous Roosevelt hot-dog. The King, on the other hand, devoured [several] with gusto.”
Littell wrote Anna that “your father particularly commends the King ‘as the real personality of the two.’” FDR explained that the king “is very much in love with the Queen, and is proud to have her in the foreground.” Littell also noted that both royals “struck a few blows . . . for Liberal government in this country, by their casual remarks about our catching up with reforms which were really old in England.” The king’s statement that power had been removed from “the capitalists quite some time ago in England” had been much quoted in the Washington papers.
Indeed, FDR wrote his Republican cousin Nicholas Roosevelt that the king and queen
are very delightful and understanding people, and, incidentally, know a great deal not only about foreign affairs in general but also about social legislation. Actually they would qualify for inclusion in that famous book, which is constantly quoted by some of your friends—not mine—to the effect that Eleanor and I are Communists!
After the royal visit, FDR urged Congress to repeal the arms embargo in the 1935 Neutrality Act and reconsider America’s role in the event of war. While there is no record of what FDR and the king discussed, we know each day they read the newspapers—filled with headline stories and editorials about ships afloat and stranded refugees.
The Roosevelts and the royals might have discussed the many headline stories and editorials about refugees that were appearing every day that June in the major newspapers. Because the new British White Paper limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, many ships with refugees were moving from port to port in the Mediterranean, and the situation was becoming critical. The Liesel, with 906 Jews on board who were not allowed to enter Palestine, reportedly dumped many of its refugees on barren Mediterranean islands.
In the western hemisphere the biggest daily headline concerned the luxurious steamship SS St. Louis. Its affluent and privileged passengers were refugees from Berlin and Breslau—they had been fired from their universities and orchestras, removed from their offices and shops, and forbidden to enjoy the simplest pleasures, even the right to saunter through a park or dine at a café. Initially they found their trip to Cuba to be restful, even happy. They had valid passports stamped with a red J.
But a new Cuban policy barred most refugees from disembarking from such ships. Already three other liners had gone from port to port seeking shelter for their passengers.* While the St. Louis waited in the harbor, representatives of the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), a Jewish refugee aid group, went to Havana to negotiate a fiscal aid package: the JDC was authorized to post a significant bond to guarantee that none of the passengers would become an economic burden. But Cuba ignored this appeal.
Captain Schröder then turned the St. Louis for the United States, sailing very slowly while the JDC worked feverishly. The frantic negotiations included the offer of a significant bribe for President Brú, who requested that the ship’s passengers purchase their safety. Brú gave the JDC forty-eight hours to raise the money. The St. Louis anchored first off the South Carolina coast, then along the Florida coast. There it was shadowed by a Coast Guard vessel to make sure nobody swam ashore. The JDC deposited $500,000 in a Cuban bank, but Brú demanded more. Additional haggling ensued until it became clear that Brú would not be satisfied.
While 734 of the 936 passengers had quota numbers for eventual admission into the United States, they were told they might have to wait three months to three years until their quota space came up. So the passengers and sympathetic U.S. citizens appealed “to the President and Congress to grant the refugees emergency asylum as a mark of international good-will at the time of the visit of the British King and Queen,” and a committee of passengers sent an “appeal to President Roosevelt for last-minute intervention.” Their wireless message: “Help them, Mr. President, the 900 passengers, of which more than 400 are women and children.”
But the United States sent no word of concern. FDR did not consider issuing an executive order to allow the ship to dock; nor did he send a telegram to influence any of his Latin American allies to take in the refugees. The State Department rejected all appeals to admit passengers temporarily—and informed the JDC that no Central or South American nation would allow the ship to dock.
It was over. The St. Louis sailed for Europe, filled with refugees in quest of a temporary haven. They “could see the shimmering towers of Miami rising from the sea,” the New York Times reported, “but for them they were only the battlements of another forbidden city. . . . Germany, with all the hospitality of its concentration camps, will welcome these unfortunates home.”
Aboard the ship, Captain Schröder overheard two small boys playing guards, surrounded by a barrier of deck chairs. Other children lined up to appeal for permission to pass and enter.
“‘Are you a Jew?’ asked one guard.
“‘Yes,’; replied the child.
“‘Jews not admitted.’
“‘Oh, please let me in. I’m only a very little Jew.’”
Negotiations continued throughout the trip back. The JDC sought refuge for the passengers in Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and France. Dutch queen Wilhelmina accepted 181 passengers. Louise Weiss, secretary general of the Central Refugee Committee in Paris, negotiated with the French foreign minister Georges Bonnet, who authorized the admission of 224. Belgium took 214, and the U.K. accepted 287. The St. Louis passengers were safe, for the moment.*
The voyage of the St. Louis served to highlight the U.S. government’s capacity for inaction and cruelty. Its haunting silence in the face of the St. Louis resounded everywhere. To date, not one word about the St. Louis has been found in ER’s writings. Ironically, her staunch friend bodyguard Earl Miller was in Florida as the St. Louis sailed slowly beyond Miami and around the Keys. Miller cabled ER in distress: surely something might be done, he pleaded—this was not a decent thing. But ER’s correspondence with Miller has been lost, so we have no idea how she answered his urgent messages regarding the St. Louis.
Miller referred to that event decades later. ER, he knew, had talked with FDR. When he inquired about her silence, she told him that FDR had handed the matter over to the State Department. There was at the time nothing she could do.*
Hitler made full use of the tragic voyage. That very week Germany expelled its Polish Jews, thousands of whom had been in Germany for generations. East Prussia expelled its remaining eleven thousand Jews. Leipzig expelled four thousand Polish Jews. Some were ordered to leave within a month, others within hours. Those without valid passports or visas were arrested. Dresden, Breslau, Kassel, Hanover, Kiel, Bremen, Nuremberg, Würzburg, and Cologne all issued orders of expulsion. Ordered “to leave or go to concentration camps,” they appealed for visas, admission, or haven anywhere.
ER pondered these developments. With her full participation, the United States had sent two specific messages to Nazi Europe. There was to be a strengthened Anglo-American alliance; this she hoped would give Hitler pause. And there would be no official protest, no governmental response to Hitler’s crusade against the Jews.
With congressional opinion vitriolic regarding refugees, FDR refused to take a stand. He would spend none of his political currency defying public or congressional sentiment concerning Jews. His priority was to end the arms embargo and promote defense measures. It is impossible to know what words were spoken to ER to keep her so uncharacteristically silent on an issue that concerned her. In the wake of the St. Louis, she must have been relieved when Chile and Bolivia declared that they would uphold “the inviolability of the right of asylum” and promised haven. China announced plans to build a colony to welcome 100,000 refugees from Europe in Yunan Province, in south-central China.
ER was relieved by these signals of hope, but dismayed by the dominant attitudes that surrounded her. Angry at being silenced and worried about the future, she worked ever more closely with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) to confront bigotry. With so many ships stranded upon the high seas, the Quakers issued Refugee Facts, a pamphlet that called for a new policy to enable Christians and Jews, dissenters and unionists, to escape Hitler’s terror. The AFSC observed that between 1933 and 1938 the United States had admitted only 26 percent of its German quota. While 241,962 immigrants from “all parts of the world” had entered the country, 246,000 people had left permanently, “a decrease of almost 5000.” AFSC chairman Clarence Pickett pointed out that 31 percent of German refugees admitted to the United States were Christian. New alliances would be necessary, ER realized, to counter indifference and end the deadly silence surrounding the refugee crisis.